John E. Suthers - Savannah, GA

A native of North Augusta, South Carolina, John E. Suthers was born in 1957. He is the founder and managing partner of Suthers & Harper, which litigates and takes to trial substantial civil damage suits. Mr. Suthers graduated with honors from the University of South Carolina and earned his law degree from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1983. He is a licensed attorney in Georgia and South Carolina.

Over his 35 year career, John Suthers has successfully handled a variety of complex personal injury and wrongful death cases, including cases resulting from abuse and neglect in nursing homes, medical malpractice, defective products, and motor vehicle accidents. Additionally, Mr. Suthers’ law firm was retained by the City of Savannah, Georgia, to represent the City in the national litigation against the manufacturers and distributors of prescription opioids, pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, in Cleveland, Ohio.

In the nursing home field, John Suthers was among the first lawyers in the U.S. to sue and hold accountable a nursing home for abusing and neglecting a patient. Mr. Suthers has tried and settled numerous cases against nursing homes, involving pressure sores, falls, malnutrition and dehydration. In the medical malpractice field, he has tried and settled cases against doctors and hospitals, involving failures to timely diagnose diseases, botched surgeries, birth injuries and medical equipment failures. In the field of defective products, he has successfully concluded cases involving dangerous drugs and defective medical and surgical products. Some of the complex motor vehicle cases he has tried and resolved successfully included collisions involving tractor-trailers, and railroad crossing cases. Often, these types of cases involved representing and counseling clients who had suffered permanent and catastrophic injuries that required lifetime medical care, and presenting the economic and non-economic losses associated with a permanent injury or wrongful death.

Mr. Suthers has served as lead trial counsel in cases filed throughout the States of Georgia and South Carolina. Additionally, he has been associated by other law firms and assisted other attorneys in cases in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. He is a member of the State Bar of Georgia, South Carolina Bar, American Bar Association, American Association for Justice, Georgia Trial Lawyers Association, South Carolina Association for Justice, and Savannah Bar Association. Mr. Suthers is also a member of the Melvin M. Belli Society, an invitation-only group of trial lawyers across the U.S., whose purpose is to promote the international exchange of ideas among lawyers through meetings and education.

John Suthers was named one of the Top 100 attorneys in the State of Georgia in 2018, 2015, 2014 and 2008 by Law & Politics, the publisher of Georgia Super Lawyers. Law & Politics adheres to a rigorous, multi-step evaluation process involving nominations, peer evaluations and professional achievement throughout the State of Georgia.

Mr. Suthers was named Savannah’s Lawyer of the Year for 2014 and 2011 in the field of Personal Injury Litigation by Best Lawyers, one of the oldest and most respected peer-review publications in the legal profession. Best Lawyers compiles its list of outstanding attorneys by conducting exhaustive peer-reviewed surveys in which thousands of leading lawyers confidentially evaluate their professional peers. Only a single lawyer in each practice area in each community was honored as the “Lawyer of the Year.” As reported in Best Lawyers, “The selected lawyers have earned a high level of respect among other leading lawyers in the same communities in the same practice areas for their abilities, their professionalism, and their integrity.”

John Suthers has achieved an AV rating by Martindale-Hubbell, the highly regarded legal publication. Martindale-Hubbell conducted an extensive review of the community's legal professionals and determined that Mr. Suthers' ability as an attorney meets the highest of standards and he possesses unquestioned professional ethics.