| For a combined 30 years, Steve Gugenheim and Julie Wallis Gugenheim have been trying lawsuits. Steve and Julie both attended Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama. Steve was a Member and Editor of the Cumberland Law Review and a member of the nationally acclaimed Cumberland Mock Trial Team. After graduating law school, Steve and Julie moved to Dallas, Texas. While Steve began his career as a defense attorney with one of the largest law firms in the United States, Julie served as an assistant district attorney and tried close to 100 misdemeanor and felony jury trials. In 1994, Steve opened his own practice and began representing the victims and the families of victims in cases involving serious personal injury and wrongful death. Julie decided to broaden her experience and began working for Allstate Insurance Company as a trial lawyer. Julie honed her trial skills by defending those accused of negligence. In 2000, Steve and Julie relocated to North Carolina to be close to family. Steve opened Gugenheim Law and Julie worked with a large Raleigh law firm defending serious personal injury cases.
After the birth of their son in 2001 and due to the growing demands of Gugenheim Law, in 2002, Julie joined Gugenheim Law. In 2003, Steve and Julie tried their first wrongful death case as a husband-wife trial team. Steve and Julie obtained one of the largest verdicts in the history of Randolph County for the family of a resident of a nursing home who fell, fractured his hip and ribs, and then died several weeks later.
Elizabeth Todd Beall joined the Gugenheim Team in early 2007 and is a native of Raleigh, North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Wake Forest Law School. Even during law school Elizabeth knew she wanted to try cases in court, so she took a job with Legal Services of the Southern Piedmont after her first year of law school, representing claimants who had been refused insurance benefits. She worked with Legal Services again the following summer representing abused and battered women in court.
After graduating from Wake Forest in 1996, Elizabeth began working in Winston-Salem for a medium-sized firm in the diverse areas of family law, personal injury and bankruptcy law. She returned to Raleigh in 1998 to be close to family, and worked in the area of family law until 2000.
In the summer of 2000, Elizabeth joined the largest plaintiff’s firm in North Carolina representing people in lawsuits against corporations and insurance companies. During the more than five years she was with the firm she represented clients in serious personal injury claims, eventually focusing her practice on nursing home and rest home negligence exclusively.
Elizabeth joined Gugenheim Law in January 2006, where she continues to focus her practice exclusively on nursing home negligence cases, and representing the residents and families of those abused or neglected in our state’s nursing homes and rest homes.
Elizabeth is the chairman of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers’ Nursing Home Negligence section, and is active in organizing and teaching seminars in nursing home litigation throughout the state. She is a member of the Wake County and North Carolina State Bars, as well as the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers and the American Association of Justice.
Elizabeth, her husband Stewart and their son Henry live in Raleigh.
Gugenheim Law, since opening its office in North Carolina, has recovered millions of dollars for its clients. In the area of nursing and rest home abuse, over the last several years, Gugenheim Law has successfully represented families in cases involving:
- Bedsores.
- Falls.
- Malnutrition and dehydration.
- Choking.
- Sexual assault.
- Improper feeding tube placement and peritonitis.
- Urinary tract infections and urosepsis.
- Aspiration and pneumonia.
- Improper medication.
- Improper pain management.
- Unexplained fractures.
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