John Alan Jones

About John Alan Jones

John Alan Jones is the founding member and managing partner of Martin & Jones, where he has worked since he began practicing law in 1982. John Alan was born and raised in Pine Level, North Carolina.  He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honorary society. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1979, he entered law school at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Holderness Moot Court.

Upon graduating from law school in 1982, John Alan began representing workers with occupational diseases caused by toxic chemicals and cotton dust. His practice soon became statewide. Representing hundreds of North Carolina workers in occupational disease cases led to an interest in both medicine and product liability claims.  In the mid-1980’s, he began representing people who had been injured by major corporations manufacturing toxic chemicals, asbestos, defective pharmaceuticals and harmful medical devices.

From 1984 until 1997, he successfully represented approximately 1,100 women from 28 states who had been injured by the Dalkon Shield IUD, many of whom became infertile due to the defective IUD.  He obtained a large verdict for his client in the last Dalkon Shield case tried in the United States.

In 1988 he first agreed to represent someone injured by medical malpractice. He tried and won that malpractice case in 1990, and he has successfully represented medical malpractice victims throughout North Carolina, having tried these cases from the mountains to the coast for more than three decades.  He now heads the firm’s medical malpractice group, which is comprised of three attorneys and seven staff members.

John Alan takes on only a small number of malpractice cases, and his approach to evaluating potential malpractice cases is consistent and simple:

• Carefully investigate the potential case
• Obtain reviews by the best experts who are highly respected throughout the medical profession
• If the reviewing expert says there is no case, accept their recommendation and explain to the client why there is not a case
• If the experts say there is a case, go “all in” and do not be outworked

This approach has resulted in an impressive track record of success and earned John Alan a reputation for hard work, excellence and integrity.  Medical malpractice insurance companies and the defense lawyers these insurance companies hire to defend malpractice cases know that  John Alan takes only serious cases which have been carefully reviewed by great experts and thoroughly worked up.  In other words, they know he does not take “frivolous claims.”

John Alan even receives referrals from malpractice insurance company representatives and malpractice defense lawyers who have been against him in malpractice cases.  Indeed, it is not unusual for him to be contacted by a doctor injured by malpractice who has been confidentially given his name by a malpractice defense lawyer or someone from a malpractice insurance company.    Such referrals are a compliment and indicate that both lawyers who have been against John Alan in malpractice cases and malpractice insurance companies respect him and see him as a “go to” malpractice lawyer when asked for recommendations by doctors, friends or loved ones.

He has also devoted a significant amount of his work time to consumer class action litigation and representing small businesses victimized by unfair business practices of major corporations.  John Alan served as lead counsel on behalf of thousands of hard-working North Carolina homeowners in class actions against major banks that targeted these homeowners  with predatory loans.  After more than seven years of litigation,  John Alan settled predatory lending class actions against a Bank of America subsidiary, NationsCredit, for $38,750,000 and a CitiBank subsidiary, Citifinancial, for $42,500,000.  Each of these class actions went to the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the North Carolina Supreme Court, resulting in landmark appellate decisions providing protection for North Carolina consumers and providing compensation to more than 12,000 North Carolina homeowners.

John Alan handles both trial and appellate work in state and federal courts throughout North Carolina and around the U.S.  He has received Martindale-Hubbell’s “AV Preeminent” peer review rating, which is the highest rating given.  He has also been recognized by his peers as a North Carolina Super Lawyer every year since 2007 and as one of North Carolina’s “Best Lawyers” every year since 2008.  Since 2014 he has eight times been voted by his peers as “Lawyer of the Year” in either Medical Malpractice, Product Liability Litigation or Mass Tort Litigation.

John Alan is married and has two children. He happily spends most of his free time on family activities and has a particular fondness for travel with his family.