A Pennsylvania swim club has agreed to a settlement of $250,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the widow of a 72 year-old man who drowned during a party two years ago. According to the lawsuit filed in Allegheny County, Olympic Swim and Health Club violated Pennsylvania law by failing to have a lifeguard at the party.
A Mississippi police department tried to cover up for a police office in a fatal car accident that killed a 19-year-old man last November in Brandon County, according to a lawsuit filed last week. Plaintiff's attorney claims that police officer was traveling nearly 30 mph over the posted speed limit and was not using his siren at the time of the crash. The lawsuit also questions police findings that the decedent was under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time of his death.
One issue was the amount of drugs and alcohol in the deceased system. Toxicology experts say that any internal injury can destroy the accuracy of the drug and BAC tests because the stomach and intestinal alcohol mix with blood when organs rupture, which increases the BAC test results. Moreover, the BAC from a deceased person must be tested from the heart which is often not what the coroner does in practice.
Doctors at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center committed medical malpractice when caring for a baby with meningitis, a Los Angeles jury found on Friday, causing the child a permanent brain injury. The jury awarded $7.3 million in damages. The award will be used to pay for past and future medical care, the medical malpractice attorneys for the child told the Associated Press.
Earlier this month, a U.S. Senate subcommittee heard testimony on the Medical Device Safety Act of 2009. This Act would rectify the abomination that was the Supreme Court's holding in Reigel v. Medtronic One witness, Dr. William Maisel, director of the Medical Device Safety Institute and a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and chairman of the FDA’s Circulatory Advisory Committee, told the Senate the obvious: it is “simply impossible” for the FDA to continue to monitor the safety of every medical device it has approved.
The Senate also heard testimony to underscore the tragedy of Reigel, a victim of the recalled Medtronic defibrillators who was shocked 22 times within 53 minutes when his Sprint Fidelis lead failed.
Progress on this bill has been slow. I guess that is Washington. But, if we cannot get this bill passed with the President's support - albeit not active - and 60 Democrats in the Senate, it is not going to happened under the current political climate. I don't have enough of a sense of Washington politics to venture a guess. I'm just hoping it is slow moving politics.
In a story likely to catch the eye of any parent with small children, six companies are responding to the deaths of three children by recalling millions of window blinds and shades. The children tragically got caught in cords that help the coverings move up and down.
The recall includes Pottery Barn Kids and IKEA as well as smaller companies that sold their window covers to major retailers like Target. No deaths have been linked to the blinds and shades from Pottery Barn Kids and IKEA, but there have been reports of kids getting caught up in the inner cord and - bless them - the companies chose to act with an abundance of caution.
John Cord explains the potential Yaz MDL here.
The family of man killed in an Idaho trucking accident while making a delivery to a dairy has sued 4-Bros Dairy, alleging negligence. The man was delivering apples to the dairy last year when a 40 foot pile of decomposing livestock feed fell on his truck as he was parking it next to the pile. . 4-Bros Dairy has already paid a $1,700 Occupational Safety and Health Administration fine over the incident.
Some of worst truck accident cases our lawyer have handled involve accidents to truck drivers who are injured not in a moving vehicle but tangentially to their operation of a truck.
You can find an article on the case here.
The Drug Recall Lawyer Blog writes today about he resignation of the head FDA’s Center of Device and Radiological Health.
The family of a New Hampshire woman crushed by another car at a Massachusetts car wash has agreed to a settlement of their accident lawsuit. The woman died in 2007 after being struck by a car driven by defendant, who still faces criminal charges. The victim's 12 year-old daughter thankfully survived the collusion.
The Boston Herald has the story.
AstraZeneca's second quarter report indicates the drug company has spent a whopping $593 million defending Seroquel, its antipsychotic/"everything else under the sun" drug that is involved in over 14,000 lawsuits around the country.
Remember you heard it here first: I think there will be settlements in these Seroquel lawsuits in the near future. This is a total guess. But this is the 21st century game plan for mass torts. Wage Churchillian war, don't offer a single Serqouel settlement, position yourself to win the early rounds (give Seroquel's defense lawyers credit for this, they have been two steps ahead of plaintiffs' Seroquel lawyers in the early rounds), and then settle the cases while you have momentum. Pfizer ran this game plan in the Vioxx cases, sans the "verdict free" part.
AstraZeneca knows that its early successes in defeating Seroquel lawsuits have given it momentum. The flaw in my "the Seroquel cases will settle soon" theory is that most people who are on top tend to overplay their hand. AstraZeneca may feel like the guy who gets hot on the blackjack table and assumes it will never end. There are still 14,000 Seroquel cases out there and not all are going to be cases where the plaintiff's diet "consisted of slurpies and donuts, fish and fries from McDonald's, Burger King and (a) lot of Chinese food."
Settlement for $1.8 million was reached in a medical malpractice lawsuit where the jury this June awarded $4 million against an emergency room doctor. While that sounds like a major compromise, there is a cap on medical malpractice awards in Virginia, so the actual verdict after the cap was $1.8 million.
Plaintiff's Virginia medical malpractice lawyers alleged that a doctor misdiagnosed their 25-year-old client's heart condition. Plaintiff's condition was eventually diagnosed by doctors at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore.
This case had complications in discovery because of a problem I have discussed before: one lawyer representing all of the doctors (you can find the details in this article on the case). Defense medical malpractice lawyers love when doctors lock hands and sing "all for one, one for all." The problem is that this invariably leads to conflicts when the doctors could very easily point at each other.
