S. Randall “Randy” Hood

The fight is personal.

S. Randall “Randy” Hood likes the fight. Some lawyers tolerate it. He looks forward to it, which most people would not consider normal. But what has never sat right with him is watching a bully kick sand in somebody’s face and get away with it. That is the setup in almost every case he takes. On one side is a family whose life came apart on an ordinary Tuesday. On the other is a hospital system or a trucking company with a claims department, a litigation budget, and a quiet expectation that the family will get worn down and take whatever is offered. Most of the time, that expectation is correct. Randy has built a career on making sure it isn’t correct in his cases.

He does not care how big the defendant is or how many lawyers show up on the other side of the table. Bullies are used to size settling the question but Randy has spent nearly 35 years proving that the most prepared lawyer usually wins, and preparation is the one advantage nobody can buy out from under you. It is why he still reads the whole chart, every page, twice (or sometimes ten times, LOL). That approach has helped secure more than $2 billion in verdicts and settlements for injured people and their families, including the $88 million Charleston Nine settlement, believed to be the largest civil rights settlement for individual claims in United States history. He is a founding partner at McGowan, Hood, Felder & Phillips, LLC, board certified as a specialist in Medical Malpractice Law by the American Board of Professional Liability, a past president of the South Carolina Association for Justice, a member of the American Board of Trial Advocates and the Southern Trial Lawyers Association, and a South Carolina Super Lawyer for sixteen straight years. He tries catastrophic injury (trucking, etc), medical malpractice, and serial sex abuse cases in state and federal courts across South Carolina.

He is also the co-founder of Jury Edge, an AI-powered litigation intelligence platform built by trial lawyers for plaintiff trial lawyers, born out of his own irritation at how much leverage gets lost to guesswork. He lectures nationally on trial advocacy, case framing, and where artificial intelligence actually helps a plaintiff’s practice, and where it doesn’t.

Beyond the courtroom.

Randy grew up in Macon, Georgia, and finished growing up in Charlotte, NC — Olympic High School, then four years at UNC Charlotte. He did not go straight to law school. He worked for four years first, which turned out to be the more useful education, and enrolled at the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1989. His first job was in Chester, SC at a salary that made couch-surfing a housing strategy rather than a phase. Two years out, he tried a statewide grand jury drug trafficking case. In 1994 he took his first nursing home and catastrophic injury cases. He picked up his first birth injury case in his fifth year of practice and tried it in his seventh, and he has been trying catastrophic injury cases ever since. Nobody handed him anything which is probably why he has never assumed a case gets won by anything other than work.

Randy and his wife live outside Charlotte and he has a daughter and three grandchildren. His faith shapes how he practices and how he treats people, and he stays active in charitable work across the region. He and his wife also own The Office Craft Bar & Kitchen in Ballantyne, where he can watch any sport day or night. He plays tennis when he can. He watches anything with a scoreboard. And he remains, against considerable evidence and at real personal cost, a Carolina Panthers and Charlotte Hornets fan.