Accident and Injury Lawyer Blog

Wisconsin’s Supreme rejected yestereday an accident lawsuit seeking damages on behalf of a high school cheerleader who suffered a serious head injury while cheering. The court's ruling found that the lawsuit was barred by Wisconsin law that prevents participants in contact sports from bringing claims for negligence that stop short of recklessness.

The notion that cheerleading is a contact sport is, of course, completely insane. Courts in their contempt for participant related sports injury lawsuits have stretched the line of what is a contact sport for years. But this is a new level of insanity in Wisconsin.

You can find an article on the case here.

Tough blow today for victims who have filed lawsuits pending in the Seroquel MDL in Orlando. Defendant AstraZeneca won a huge victory with a dismissal of two Seroquel lawsuits claiming its antipsychotic drug Seroquel causes diabetes and other health consequences.

This "bellwether" MDL trial was set to start February 2, 2009 in Orlando, Florida where the vast majority of the current Seroquel lawsuits are parked. Judge Anne Conway threw out the cases saying at a hearing that they "just didn't meet the standards" to go to trial. Specifically, and I think bizarrely considering the medical evidence of the link between diabetes and Seroquel, the court found the plaintiffs could not prove that the former Seroquel users diabetes was linked to Seroquel.

Update: I might have gone off a little to quickly on this story. It seems like the finding was a lack of specific causation between the plaintiffs' diabetes in this case and Seroquel. You can look at the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog post that has a Seroquel update here.

I wrote earlier today about a wrongful death case in Kentucky in the heat exhaustion death of a high school football player. In another wrongful death heat exhaustion case, ESPN reports that the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the widow of former Minnesota Vikings offensive tackle Korey Stringer against the NFL has been settled.

Parents who have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against their son's high school coaches for his heat exhaustion death were given some powerful ammunition today: a Kentucky high school football coach was charged with reckless homicide in connection with the death.

The charges here are a little stronger than in Jason Street's frivolous lawsuit against Coach Taylor in NBC's Friday Night Lights for failure to teach him how to properly tackle. The player's body temperature reached 107 degrees and he was denied medical care or water for more than 20 minutes on a very hot day. In other words, a death that reasonably could have been avoided.

Continue reading " Kentucky Wrongful Death Lawsuit " »

A number of mostly medical malpractice related links from around the web today

The San Jose Mercury News reports on a medical malpractice lawsuit filed against the San Mateo Medical Center. Plaintiff alleges that his heart was permanently damaged after the center left a broken catheter in his heart and, even more seriously, that the hospital covered up the mistake. Although Plaintiff did not know about the catheter's break -which is the size of a drinking straw - until July 2008, it was clearly visible on x-rays and scans more than two years before. The first operation to remove the catheter was unsuccessful. Open heart surgery was required during which a heart valve was destroyed and had to be replaced with a valve from a pig’s heart. To make matters worse, the plaintiff has cancer.

I do not know what happened here and I think medical malpractice cover-ups do happen. But this is actually a rare sighting for medical malpractice lawyers. The vast majority of doctors and hospitals accused of medical malpractice were trying to do the right thing... but didn't.

Interesting article on what sounds like an insane medical malpractice trial in Jefferson County in a breast cancer misdiagnosis lawsuit.

It is crazy easy for lawyers to complain about judges, complaining that judges take too much or too little control of a courtroom. I'm sure it is easy to say when you don't have to actually preside over a case yourself. But listening to the facts of this medical malpractice case, I think there is no question the judge needs to get a tighter grip on the medical malpractice lawyers in his courtroom.

Louisiana Medical News provides an article on the discussions in Louisiana about medical malpractice caps.

Johnson & Johnson announced another Duragesic patch recall. The problems appear to be the same as other fentanyl patch recalls: pain patches that leak fentanyl gel. Fentanyl overdoses have long been known to cause death and serious injuries.

This is hardly the beginning of the Duragesic pain patch recalls. In the most recent on New Year’s Eve last year, Johnson & Johnson announced a recall for some Duragesic 50 microgram per hour patches (lot number 0817239) and some of the Sandoz 50 microgram per hour patches (lot number 0816851). This total pain patch recall involves 410,000 pain patches.

Continue reading " Pain Patch Lawyers: Another Recall for Fentanyl Leak " »

The Chicago Tribute reports that Provena Mercy Medical Center in Illinois has agreed to pay $6.5 million to settle a medical malpractice lawsuit filed on behalf of a boy who allegedly suffered brain injury during birth. In the malpractice lawsuit, Plaintiffs' attorneys argued that doctors and staff at failed to respond to the child's reaction to the drug Pitocin.

A new hot topic in medical malpractice is infection cases. A Pennsylvania woman who allegedly contracted a staph infection which that resulted in facial scarring while she was working as a prison guard at Graterford Prison in 2003 settled her claim or $226,000. Alas, this was a not a medical malpractice claim but a workers' compensation claim against the prison.

You can read the full article here which includes a picture of the scarring. Obviously, a successful medical malpractice claim would have resulted in a larger recovery 90% of the time. Proving a workers comp claim - that the staph came from the prison - will generally not be that difficult for an evidentiary standpoint. The hard part of a hospital staph infection case is proving negligence.

USA Today reports on a new New England Journal of Medicine study finding that a third of newborns may be at risk for respiratory distress and other health consequences C-section that were performed too early. According to the study, 36% of 13,258 elective repeat C-sections from 1999 to 2002 were performed sooner than the 39 full weeks of gestation recommended by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The authors of the study noted that babies delivered by C-section prior to 39 weeks are about twice as likely to have at least one birth-related problem.

Related Posts

A federal judge in Minnesota yesterday granted Medtronic's motion for summary judgment setting up an appeal and a plea to Congress to act to overrule the Supreme Court's holding in Medtronic v. Riegel.

I don't want to soft pedal what a setback this ruling is for the Medtronic lead lawsuits. But these cases are far from over.

For more on the story and for a copy of the ruling, click here.

The family of a man killed by police during an attempted arrest for a gang related murder has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Sunnyvale. The family contends the decedent did not attempt to run over the police officers and was not resisting arrest at the time of his death. The family filed a previous suit six months ago, but withdrew it after the city protested that it was too vague. The city plans to seek a dismissal of the case again. You can find one of the articles on this case here.

Sunnyvale is not the only city in California to face a similar lawsuit. In what would appear on its face to be a more compelling case invovling an innocent 20-year-old black man who had a wife and small child, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed against the city of Anaheim for fatally shooting this young man in his frontyard. You can find that story here.

It is impossible to prejudge a case with knowing all of the facts. But absent other factors which very well may exist, Plaintiff's wrongful death claim in the latter case seems strong.