[UPDATE: On November 19, 2010, the Pennsylvania Superior Court granted en banc reargument and withdrew the opinion discussed below. Stay tuned.]
[UPDATE II: On February 24, 2011, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided Gillard, W. v. AIG Insurance Co., et al., No. 10 EAP 2010, which clarified an unsettled point in
Some of the largest cases involve medical malpractice cerebral palsy. A recent medical malpractice case from the bought-yourself-an-appeal department:
Citing multiple trial errors, a New Jersey appeals court has reversed an $18.9 million verdict against an obstetrician whose delay in ordering a Caesarean delivery a jury found to have caused cerebral palsy in
Over at the [non]billable hour, Matthew Homann posted a hilarious Venn Diagram for "What Lawyers Put In Their Biographies" vs. "What Clients Look For In Lawyer Biographies."
The diagram is so true it hurts to look at it. The first line in What Clients Look For — "will you return my calls?" — touches on
Norm Pattis has some advice for trial lawyers:
A friend recommended several films as classics about trial, so my wife and watched one of them over the weekend, Otto Preminger’s, Anatomy of a Murder. …
What makes the film worth watching, however, was the manner in which both sides asked patently improper questions
One of the big issues that’s been floating around the personal injury / wrongful death world over the past few years is the extent to which states can recoup the money they spent on an injured person’s care if that person later sues the person who caused the injury and obtains a settlement.
The Supreme
I’ve posted many times before about the economic realities of medical malpractice liability. Via The Pop Tort, a new study commissioned by the the Society of Actuaries has revealed the economic cost of medical malpractice in America:
SCHAUMBURG, Ill., (Aug. 9, 2010)–Findings from a new study released today estimate that measurable medical errors cost the U.S. economy $19.5 billion in 2008. Commissioned by the Society of Actuaries (SOA) and completed by consultants with Milliman, Inc., the report used claims data to provide an actuarially sound measurement of costs for avoidable medical injuries. Of the approximately $80 billion in costs associated with medical injuries, around 25 percent were the result of avoidable medical errors.
"This report highlights a singular opportunity for both improving the overall quality of care and reducing healthcare costs in this country," says Jim Toole, FSA, CERA, MAAA and managing director of MBA Actuaries, Inc. "Of the $19.5 billion in total costs, approximately $17 billion was the result of providing inpatient, outpatient and prescription drug services to individuals who were affected by medical errors. While this cost is staggering, it also highlights the need to reduce errors and improve quality and efficiency in American healthcare."
Medical errors are a significant source of lost healthcare funds every year. For example, the study found that $1.1 billion was from lost productivity due to related short-term disability claims, and $1.4 billion was lost from increased death rates among individuals who experienced medical errors. According to a recent SOA survey, which identified ways to bend the national healthcare cost curve, 87 percent of actuaries believe that reducing medical errors is an effective way to control healthcare cost trends for the commercial population, and 88 percent believe this to be true for the Medicare population.
"We used a conservative methodology and still found 1.5 million measureable medical errors occurred in 2008," says Jonathan Shreve, FSA, MAAA, consulting actuary for Milliman and co-author of the report. "This number includes only the errors that we could identify through claims data, so the total economic impact of medical errors is in fact greater than what we have reported."
(Emphases added.)
Compare that nearly $20 billion cost — a conservative estimate limited to the ascertainable economic harm, excluding any pain, suffering, embarrassment, humiliation, or mental anguish, caused by avoidable medical errors — to the mere $4.694 billion paid out to medical malpractice plaintiffs in 2008 (see Exhibit D).
That is to say, payouts to malpractice victims amount to less than one-quarter of the economic damage caused by the malpractice itself.
If someone told you that oil companies only paid twenty-three cents for every dollar of damage they negligently caused through avoidable oil spills, what would you say?
If someone told you that car, airplane or boat companies only paid twenty-three cents for every dollar of damage they negligently caused through defective designs and manufacturing, what would you say?
If someone told you that fast food companies only paid twenty-three cents for every dollar of damage they negligently caused through avoidable food poisoning, what would you say?
If someone told you that consumer appliance companies only paid twenty-three cents for every dollar of damage they negligently caused through electric shorts that caused fires, what would you say?
Would you say there was a liability "crisis" caused by an "explosion" of "frivolous" litigation?
Or would you say those companies weren’t living up to their responsibilities?Continue Reading The Economic Damage Caused By Medical Malpractice Dwarfs The Cost Of Lawsuits
In a patent infringement suit, the defendant’s first line of defense is almost always a counterclaim that the plaintiff’s patent is either invalid or unenforceable. There’s little to lose in raising the counterclaim and potentially a lot to gain, including the possibility of a judgment rendering the patent invalid forever.
Patently-O refers us to Golden
Modern society has two means by which it assesses truth or falsity: science and law. Just as Einstein recognized "there is no logical path to the [elemental laws of the universe]; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them," Holmes taught "the life of the law has not been logic; it has been
Two separate classes of retired NFL players have sued the two firms, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and McKool Smith, alleging that they left some retirees out of the settlement and blew the chance for much greater damages, according to a copy of the complaint. The original class action accused the NFL players’ union of intentionally excluding retired players from licensing deals, including the ultra-lucrative deal through which the video game maker Electronic Arts purchased the right to use player names and images in its popular John Madden franchise. The union, represented by Dewey & LeBoeuf, denied the allegations, but a sympathetic jury delivered the $28 million verdict, which was to be distributed to about 2,000 retired players. (The two sides eventually settled for just over $26 million.)
In short, the players claim their attorneys botched the trial of the case in two ways:
I litigate legal malpractice cases, and let me tell you: the deck is stacked in favor of the defendant.
Even where the defendant outright fails to do a basic task — like fail to file a claim within the statute of limitations — the plaintiff still must prove they would have won the "case within the case."* That is, of course, just as hard as winning the case in the first place, and then you also have to win the malpractice case, too.
Let’s put aside the second error raised by the retired NFL players, the proof-of-damages issue. While it would certainly be less-than-ideal for a lawyer not to cover all of their bases at trial, analysis of such an issue is necessarily very fact-intensive. No time for that; this is a blog, after all.
The complaint portrays the first error as garden variety malpractice, since the emails were "obvious hearsay," and so couldn’t be introduced without (a) an EA employee providing testimony that triggered the "business records" exception to hearsay or (b) the author of the email testifying about the email itself.
The admissibility problems of email aren’t anything new; Gregory Joseph wrote a thorough article about them two years ago. Although not every email by a non-party is admitted into a civil trial — many, probably most, aren’t — It would indeed be garden-variety malpractice to not know your way around the Federal Rules of Evidence well enough to even try to get the email in. The complaint’s allegations on this point, however, don’t make sense to me:
At the final pretrial conference the District Court requested supplemental briefing on the extent to which Strauser’s internal EA e-mail statements were admissible. Defendants promised to provide a brief because the admissibility of this document was "critical." Following submission of the briefs, the District Court found that the proper foundation had not been laid for admitting the Strauser portions of the e-mail into evidence.
I’d assume those briefs would cover most of the bases claimed now as malpractice; did the lawyers really not even mention the business records exception or the possibility of calling Mr. Strauser?
The question bothered me enough that I looked up the relevant briefs on admissibility; here’s the plaintiff’s brief and here’s the defendant’s brief. Sure enough, there was ample briefing on the business records exception; plaintiffs apparently just plain lost that one. That’s not, in itself, surprising; Gregory Joseph’s article mentions plenty of cases holding the same (though plenty of cases holding otherwise).
The plaintiff’s lawyers tried to call the email a "business record" and tried to call the email a "present sense impression" of the EA executive, and lost on both. Losing an argument before the judge is not same thing as malpractice.
That leaves the question of calling Strauser to the stand. At one of the hearings, the Court and the plaintiff’s lawyer had the following exchange:
THE COURT: Why don’t you bring in Strausser, who’s
the guy, and let him be cross-examined?
MR. HUMMEL: I would love to. I understand he lives
in Florida. We did not depose him in the case. We will have
Mr. Linzner here under subpoena, and Mr. Linzner can testify as
to Mr. Strausser’s position, and his authority to speak within
the context of the EA.
Mr. Hummel’s predicament is understandable; "the subpoena power of a court cannot be more extensive than its jurisdiction." U.S. Catholic Conf. v. Abortion Rights Mobilization, Inc., 487 U.S. 72, 76, 108 S.Ct. 2268, 2270, 101 L.Ed.2d 69, 76 (1988). As the Southern District of New York noted (in evaluating service of subpoenas on members of the PLO):
Service of a subpoena, even if properly effected, is only valid if served on a party who is subject to personal jurisdiction within this district. The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the exercise of personal jurisdiction to persons having certain "minimum contacts" with the forum. Ina Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310, 316, 66 S.Ct. 154, 158, 90 L.Ed. 95, 102 (1945). A court may exercise personal jurisdiction only over a defendant whose "conduct and connection with the forum State are such that he should reasonably anticipate being haled into court there." Burger King Corp. v. Rudzewicz, 471 U.S. 462, 474, 105 S.Ct. 2174, 2183, 85 L.Ed.2d 528 (1985) (quoting World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286, 297, 100 S.Ct. 559, 567, 62 L.Ed.2d 490 (1980)).
Since Strauser apparently lived (and worked?) in Florida, any subpoena served by the attorney wouldn’t have been effective.
I don’t know enough about Mr. Linzner’s role to say if he was indeed the best witness to call to authenticate the email and provide testimony that would trigger a hearsay exception. It sure seems like the plaintiff’s lawyer thought he was the most knowledgeable witness they could subpoena.
There is another issue that needs explanation, though: Electronic Arts quite obviously transacts substantial business in the Northern District of California, and so would have been subject to service under Rule 45(b). Why not subpoena them to produce the witness most familiar with the email in question? That’d be a backdoor method of getting Strauser on the stand, and the failure to do so demands some explanation.
Then again, as shown by the transcript, the Court itself accepted at face value counsel’s inability to call Strauser, and so many have implicitly accepted that the backdoor method was either unreasonable or also not available for some reason. That makes me wonder why the email wasn’t admitted under Rule 807:
A statement not specifically covered by Rule 803 or 804 but having equivalent circumstantial guarantees of trustworthiness, is not excluded by the hearsay rule, if the court determines that (A) the statement is offered as evidence of a material fact; (B) the statement is more probative on the point for which it is offered than any other evidence which the proponent can procure through reasonable efforts; and (C) the general purposes of these rules and the interests of justice will best be served by admission of the statement into evidence.
That seems to be precisely the situation here; no one genuinely doubted the email was authentic, or that it represented the actual thoughts and perception of Strauser. The issues preventing its admission were all legal technicalities.
I don’t know if the plaintiff’s referenced that exception, but I also don’t know if it matters — the Court knows the Rules just as well, and likely better, than the attorneys. It seemed the Court was intent on excluding that email no matter what the plaintiffs said, which makes me wonder if it was really malpractice not to get the email admitted. Put simply, if a judge wants to rule one way, it’s usually not the lawyer’s fault if they can’t convice the judge otherwiseContinue Reading Retired NFL Players’ Suit: Is It Legal Malpractice To Not Find A Hearsay Exception For An Email By An Out-of-State Witness?
Via the WSJ Law Blog, the Ninth Circuit, in a significant published opinion with ramifications for copyright litigators, vacated the $10 million verdict — and, more importantly, the constructive trust and injunction — that Mattel won against MGA.
Unusually, the panel summed up its own findings at the end:
[Carter] Bryant’s employment agreement may