Ms. Breneman spent the first eight years of her practice with the two largest law firms in Kansas City. Assigned to their trial divisions, Ms. Breneman defended lawsuits in seventeen (17) states and tried cases in multiple venues. Focusing on products liability litigation and commercial litigation, Ms. Breneman has served as both regional and trial counsel for a natural gas utility company managing their entire litigation docket including products liability, antitrust, contract disputes, insurance coverage, toxic tort, environmental and commercial matters. Ms. Breneman also served as a member of a major breast implant manufacturer's regional trial team, worked on international matters for an architect/engineering firm and commodities litigation for the second-largest privately held Italian corporation.
For the last nine years, Ms. Breneman has done exclusively plaintiffs’ commercial and product liability litigation. For eight of those years, Ms. Breneman was a partner with the law firm of Shaffer Lombardo Shurin until she started her own practice in January of 2006. Ms. Breneman recently took one of the lead roles investigating and prosecuting an insurance receivership action against officers, directors, and accountants of the second-largest Missouri-domiciled life insurance company. Plaintiffs counsel’s efforts resulted in a recovery of approximately 48 million dollars for a class comprised of the company's members.
Ms. Breneman has also litigated numerous complex commercial matters against HMOs and PPOs on behalf of physician practices regarding contract and reimbursement issues. Most recently, Ms. Breneman started and serves as a lead attorney on a class of Kansas City physicians against the area’s major health care insurers for fraud, breach of contract and antitrust violations and is pursuing the largest worker compensation network for breach of contract claims on behalf of approximately 50 orthopedic surgeons.
Ms. Dungan has represented clients in high stakes litigation across the country including, most recently, clients with devastating burn injuries and physicians in commercial litigation against HMOs and PPOs. Prior to forming Breneman Dungan, L.L.C. in 2007, Ms. Dungan spent more than a decade representing clients in the tobacco, pharmaceutical and medical device industries while practicing law with Shook, Hardy & Bacon, LLP, a leading international product liability firm.
Ms. Dungan has extensive expertise in pretrial discovery and complex case management in massive national litigation, working with corporate clients in planning, creating and executing strategies to manage the overwhelming burdens of thousands of ongoing product liability cases. In executing these strategies, she managed large legal teams and participated in designing and maintaining state-of-the-art electronic systems and document depositories to effectively meet pretrial discovery demands in thousands of active cases.
Her substantial experience in pretrial practice covers all areas including effectively targeting corporate discovery; electronic discovery; document destruction and preservation issues; privilege issues and challenges; document confidentiality; exhibit protocols; third-party discovery; class action discovery; discovery motions; and evidentiary issues. Ms Dungan’s experience has taught her that an attorney will significantly increase the value of the case through aggressive and skilled pretrial practice.
During her first decade of practice, Ms. Dungan was a trial lawyer with two Kansas City law firms and Senior Counsel for a national title insurance company. During those years Ms. Dungan represented clients as pretrial and trial counsel in high stakes litigation including premises, malpractice, collision, and commercial liability cases. Some of Ms. Dungan’s representative cases include lead attorney representation of an installer of water sprinklers in litigation resulting from a total loss fire in the largest warehouse in metropolitan Kansas City, representation of emergency room doctors in failure to diagnose litigation, and representation of a tractor-trailer company and driver in a multi-car pile-up resulting in several deaths.
Ms. Dungan has argued cases before the Missouri Court of Appeals, Kansas Court of Appeals and Kansas Supreme Court.
Professional Associations
Ms. Dungan is licensed to practice law in Missouri and Kansas. She is a member of the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association, the Kansas and Missouri Bar Associations, and the American Association for Justice.
Education
Ms. Dungan graduated cum laude from Washburn University School of Law in 1987. She received her B.S. in Accounting in 1984 from Kansas State University.
