About Heather J. Kelly
Heather J. Kelly is a trial attorney at Gilman & Bedigian specializing in medical malpractice, birth injuries, and catastrophic personal injury cases. After spending nearly twenty years representing doctors and hospitals in complex medical malpractice defense, she switched to plaintiff work and joined Gilman & Bedigian in 2025. She has tried cases before juries in Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia, and has been specially admitted in Utah, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Washington State to represent injured patients. She has helped families secure multimillion-dollar settlements for catastrophically injured children and has achieved jury verdicts and settlements for clients across a range of serious injury claims, including sexual abuse, intentional injury, and Federal Tort Claims cases against the U.S. government.
From 2019 to 2023, she taught the Medical Liability course at American University's Washington College of Law. She earned her J.D. from George Washington University Law School, where she was a Dean's Fellow in Legal Research and Writing and a member of the Trial Court Board. She received the 2023 NAACP President's Award and recognition from the Virginia Access to Justice Commission.
Proven verdicts and settlements at Gilman & Bedigian
These results are credited to Gilman & Bedigian. A result appears under an attorney's own name only when a published source names them as counsel on the case.
A Philadelphia jury returned a $182.7 million verdict, later reaching $207.6 million with interest and upheld through the Pennsylvania Superior Court in July 2025, against the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for a 45-minute delay in performing a C-section on a mother with a known uterine infection, leaving her child with permanent cerebral palsy.
A Philadelphia jury awarded $108.6 million to a boy who suffered permanent brain damage during a December 2018 forceps delivery at Einstein Medical Center, in a case tried by Gilman & Bedigian against Jefferson Health. Jefferson has vowed to appeal, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is already reviewing the same liability doctrines in the firm's earlier $183 million Penn Medicine verdict, so the award is far from final.
A Baltimore City jury awarded $55 million after Johns Hopkins Hospital delayed an emergency cesarean section for more than two hours following a home-birth transfer, leaving infant Enzo Martinez with permanent cerebral palsy and profound neurological injuries.
A Baltimore County jury found that University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center performed an unjustified emergency cesarean section on a mother showing no confirmed signs of labor, delivering her son at 23 weeks and causing severe brain damage that will require lifelong care.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
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