David J. Hodge

David Hodge’s Madison County roots run deep.

He grew up on the family cotton farm that his father and grandfather owned outside New Market, and it was there where he learned his first lessons about the value of hard work.

As an undergraduate at Samford University in Birmingham, he was active on the debate team and knew that he wanted to become a lawyer. He attended the University of Alabama School of Law, where he was senior editor of the Law Review, was named a Hugo Black Scholar, and graduated with honors in 2000.

After receiving his law degree, he clerked for Judge Inge P. Johnson in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama and then practiced in a Birmingham law firm for 10 years. His desire to return home to Madison County grew ever stronger, and in 2010 he came back to launch his current practice.

Throughout his career, David Hodge has focused his practice on products-liability cases and mass torts, but he also has a very strong emphasis on small-business representation and has won several significant verdicts for these clients. They include a $17.5 million verdict for a timber company in a case involving fraudulent representations about a faulty log skidder in 2009 and a $3.2-million verdict in DeKalb County in 2012 for a pig farmer who had received pneumonia-afflicted pigs from a livestock broker.

David Hodge has won more than $50 million in verdicts and settlements for his clients in state and federal courts all over the U.S., including California, Oklahoma, Illinois, New York, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

His practice is busy, but he manages to apply his commitment to justice in other ways as well. He is a frequent speaker at legal seminars and has also created two litigation support groups for the American Association for Justice, one dealing with lawnmower accidents and the other with use of Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA) in building materials.

He has been appointed to serve as Co-Chair of the Settlement Committee that has been organized in Birmingham as part of Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Antitrust Litigation.

He is also a member of the Alabama State Bar Association’s Judicial Liaison Committee and the Civil Rules Committee for the U.S. District for the Northern District of Alabama.

No matter what kind of case he’s handling at Morris, King & Hodge, P.C., Hodge has the same motivation in each.

“I like helping people,” he says. “And I like helping small businesses. In a lot of cases, there’s a larger corporation that thinks they can just bully the small business and take advantage of them. These are the types of cases I really enjoy.”

Hodge’s wife, Laura Hodge, is a prosecutor in the Northern Alabama U.S. Attorney’s office, and they both try to carve out as much time as possible to spend with their two daughters and activities as members of First United Methodist Church.

An avid outdoorsman, David Hodge particularly enjoys quail hunting and fly fishing.