$12 Million Medical Malpractice Verdict in Pennsylvania
A woman with terminal breast cancer was awarded $12 million a failure to diagnose cancer medical malpractice case on Wednesday.
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February 29, 2008
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February 29, 2008
Victory for Medical Malpractice Victims in Virginia
Last month, I wrote about the Virginia Supreme Court's expected ruling regarding whether tax-exempt physician foundations should have immunity from medical malpractice liability. The TortsProf Blog reports today that the Virginia Supreme Court did the right thing (my words, not theirs) and found that tax-exempt doctor foundations are not immune from medical malpractice liability.
This is an important victory for medical malpractice victims in Virginia who would have been left without a remedy and in the majority of Virginia medical malpractice cases had the Virginia Supreme Court found that these doctor foundations were immune from medical malpractice lawsuits.
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February 29, 2008
Oregon and Colorado Consider Raising Caps of Damages in Personal Injury Cases
The TortsProf Blog reports that state legislatures in Colorado and Oregon are considering increases to their caps on noneconomic damages. Colorado is currently debating a bill that would raise the cap on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases from a measly $300,000 to a less measly, but still ridiculously low, $450,000. The bill was voted out of committee on Monday and will now be sent to the Senate floor for debate. The details are here.
Oregon is wrestling with a last year’s Oregon Supreme Court ruling that caps on damages payable by the state was unconstitutional as applied. The task force has been set up in Oregon to study the issue of raising the cap on noneconomic damages.
In the history of caps on noneconomic damages, the door has swung only one way - toward adding caps or decreasing the amount of the cap. Hopefully, this news for the clients of personal injury lawyers, that the door will begin to swing in the other direction.
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February 26, 2008
Medical Malpractice Class Action Lawsuit in Texas
Eleven plaintiffs, including former Dallas Cowboy Ron Springs, filed a class action lawsuit yesterday challenging the Texas Medical Malpractice and Tort Reform Act as unconstitutional.
I suspect this argument will fail miserably. I think the effort to solve the medical malpractice cap problem in Texas is through the Texas Legislature. Hopefully, the Texas Trial Lawyers Association are marshaling a quality effort to convince the Texas Legislature that they have gone down a path that has seriously compromised the basis rights of people who have been seriously injured as the result of medical malpractice in Texas.
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February 26, 2008
Tennessee Federal District Court
The New York Personal Injury Lawyer Blog has an interesting post thes election of one lawyer President Bush seeks to elevate to the Tennessee federal district court bench.
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February 18, 2008
$2.6 Million Awarded by Pennsylvania Jury In Failure to Diagnose Breast Cancer Medical Malpractice Case
A Lehigh County, Pennsylvania jury awarded a Monroe County woman almost $4 million in medical malpractice case for failure to diagnose her cancer.
Because the jury found that Plaintiff was also 35 percent negligent, the total award against the defendant under Pennsylvania’s comparative negligence scheme in personal injury cases is reduced to $2.6 million.
The doctor accused of malpractice had diagnosed the lump as a sebaceous cyst of the chest wall. He told the Plaintiff that is was not cancer but that she could have it drained if it became a problem. Accordingly, the Plaintiff’s medical malpractice lawyers argued at trial that the doctor was negligent in failing to recommend follow up testing that would have uncovered her breast cancer before it spread to her bones.
While $2.6 million dollars is a lot of money, you never walk away from medical malpractice cases like this thinking the Plaintiff has won because she has already lost so much more than $2.4 million.
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February 14, 2008
New Relief for Injured Workers in Pennsylvania
The Philadelphia Injury Lawyer Blog has a good post on recent change for the better in workers' compensation law in Pennsylvania.
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February 13, 2008
Blue Cross of California Sees the Light
Yesterday, Blue Cross of California relented and agreed to stop using a letter that asks doctors to report conditions that would give the insurer cause to cancel new patients’ health insurance coverage.
"This letter was part of Blue Cross' pattern of unfairly canceling policies when people need coverage most," said Richard Frankenstein, the California Medical Association president. "We're relieved that Blue Cross is ending this particular tactic but continue to have serious concerns about this company's practices."
It is just incredible to me that Blue Cross of California felt that it would be appropriate for doctors to act as their private investigators to provide information detrimental to their own patients. Blue Cross of California seems to be waging war against it own policyholders. Last year, California fined Blue Cross $1 million for unfairly revoking health coverage. The Blue Cross name is a big one and with that comes market share. But at some point, their reputation is going to be such that policyholders are going to find other options.
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February 11, 2008
Pennsylvania Jury Verdict of $10.2 Million for Paralyzed Teenager
The Insurance Journal reports that a Pennsylvania jury awarded $10.2 million to a teenager who paralyzed in a drunken driving crash while wearing a lap belt in the backseat of a Volkswagen.
The verdict assigned 51 percent of the liability to the drunk driver, 39 percent to Volkswagen and 10 percent to the utility company who owned the pole utility to the pole that the driver hit.
There is no way to be sure but I suspect this case was all about Volkswagon. The drunk driver I’m sure already tendered their policy of insurance, whatever that was. The utility company also settled before trial. But Volkswagen owes Plaintiff over $3.9 million. This sounds like a lot but she has already incurred about $5 million in medical bills.
Plaintiff injury’s in this case is called submarining. This is where the accident victim, usually a child or smaller adult, slips underneath the lap belt during a car accident, causing the belt to ride up on the abdomen leading to internal injuries. Typically, this person is sitting in middle of the backseat. Because the middle seat is infrequently used, it has largely been ignored by car manufacturers with regard to passenger safety in car accidents. Finally, the federal government stepped in and mandated that new cars sold after September 1, 2007 in the United States must have a combination lap and shoulder belt in all back seat positions, including the middle seat.
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February 11, 2008
Average Jury Verdicts in Kansas City
The Kansas City Star reported last month that the average plaintiffs' verdicts in the Kansas City metro area last year averaged nearly $1.3 million, nearly double the 2006 average of $688,337.
Does this mean that Kansas City juries have become remarkably more liberal? No. Now is the time to dust off all of those “you can prove anything with statistics” clichés.
Average verdicts are always misleading because they involve highs that completely distort the average which is why most statistical analysis of jury verdicts uses the median verdict not the average jury verdicts.
The Kansas City had three big verdicts that make the average misleading: (1) Sprint’s $69.5 million verdict against Vonage Holdings in a patent dispute; (2) a $20 million award to a student injured in a diving accident; and a $17.3 million verdict against American Family Mutual Insurance Co. in a class-action lawsuit over the sale of aftermarket auto parts.
These verdicts themselves are misleading to the extent that insurance companies want to claim this is evidence of juries run amok. The patent case involved a big business dispute where were, as they often are, high. In the diving accident case, the jury found the plaintiff was 20% responsible for his own injuries reducing to $16 million. It is also worth nothing that the plaintiff is a quadriplegic and most of the damages will go towards the medical bills he will incur for the rest of his life. Accordingly, it was certainly not a runaway jury verdict. The verdict against American Family Insurance was tossed by the trial judge who ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to prove their theory of damages.
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February 8, 2008
Cries for Tort Reform in Florida
The Orlando Sentinel has an editorial today decrying frivolous lawsuits in Florida. The editorial provides a class example of frivolous lawsuits filed by Florida personal injury lawyers that are destroying Florida:
“For example, last year a law-enforcement officer in Central Florida was among those who responded to a 911 call when a 1-year-old fell into a swimming pool. The officer injured her knee when she slipped on a puddle of water left when the child was removed from the pool. The child survived but was brain-damaged. The officer, however, sued the child's family, even though all her bills were covered by the city. Thankfully, the officer's frivolous slip-and-fall lawsuit received so much negative attention that she withdrew it.”
This example supports even more tort reform in Florida? Of course, people are going to bring frivolous complaints under any system. If the goal is zero tolerance for complaints that turn out to have little merit in our legal system, we are going to have to make a lot of changes. The reality is police are going to bring charges against people that are later show to be innocent, the government is going to go after pharmaceutical companies and later find they committed no violations, and you are going to accuse your spouse/friend/child of a “crime” they did not commit. Hopefully, these errors/mistakes/misunderstanding are caught before too much harm is done.
In this case, the system worked. A claim without merit was brought and the claimant – presumably with help from his personal injury lawyer or the system – realized the claim was without foundation.
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February 8, 2008
Voir Dire in Connecticut
The Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog yesterday was discussing an article about Voir Dire in Maryland and how quick and expedited the Maryland voir dire is. Voir dire is the procedure by which a jurors are question by the parties' lawyers and/or the trial judge.
Connecticut is the exact opposite of Maryland. Connecticut is one of a small minority of states that questions jurors in voir dire individually rather than in a group. Neither the federal government nor any of our sister states employ Connecticut's individual voir dire selection for juries. Voir dire in places like Maryland and South Carolina can take less than an hour. According to a National Law Journal article, voir dire in Connecticut typically takes 16 hours.
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February 8, 2008
Connecticut Personal Injury Verdicts
A recent study conducted by Jury Verdict Research found the median compensation in personal injury trials in Connecticut is $17,391 and injury victims obtain a financial recovery in 58% of cases that go to trial. This is less than half the national average.
One reason why the personal injury verdicts in Connecticut are particularly low is that the small claims limit maximum in personal injury cases is $5,000. Accordingly, Connecticut personal injury lawyers are required to seek jury trials for smaller cases that would not warrant a jury trial in other jurisdictions. So the number, while disconcerting for Connecticut injury victims and their lawyers, may be someone misleading.
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February 8, 2008
Medical Malpractice Lawsuit Regarding Cancerous Lungs Tranplant
A medical malpractice lawsuit was filed this week in Pennsylvania by the mother of lung transplant patient who died after he received the cancerous lungs of a 31 year-old smoker during a. Plaintiff’s medical malpractice lawsuit contends that the doctors at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania knowingly misrepresented the identity of the lung donor. The lawsuit also names the doctor who determined the lungs to be suitable for transplant and the organ donation program that provided the lungs.
I can’t speak to the merits of the case. But it is certainly a sad case. The Plaintiff's son had had pulmonary sarcoidosis - a rare disease that can thicken lung tissue to the point at which it can no longer transmit oxygen into the bloodstream. To receive the gift of life after a transplant – which is always a risky proposition – only to lose it again is tragic regardless of whether the cause of death was negligence or simply bad luck.
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February 5, 2008
Medical Malpractice in Kentucky
Karla Ward of the Kentucky Herald Leader reports that the Kentucky Medical Association has tort reform on the agenda for this legislative session. Specifically, doctors say they want a constitutional amendment that would eliminate frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits.
The article does not articulate specifics. But is hard to imagine any scenario where this is going to happen. The national trend is to acknowledge the "medical malpractice crisis" was hardly a crisis at all but rather at high point in the highs and lows of medical malpractice claims.
The article also mentions a study that was done showing a shortage of doctors in Kentucky. I have not read this study but it seems like a dozen or so get release every year coincidentally just before the state legislative session. Unless a study is done by a truly independent party, it is difficult to lend it much credibility.
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