Have you ever served on a jury? I’m no knuckle dragger (well, a little), but thinks look different up there even in the simplest of cases. Tough job. I don’t like the idea of professional jurors, but it might be a good idea in many ways.
I am a lawyer who represents plaintiffs in medical malpractice cases. The comments regarding this article could not be further from the truth. The case at issue had to be based upon actual malpractice supported by testimony of an obstetrician. Otherwise, the judge would not have allowed the case to get to the jury. Contrary to the comments, jurors very rarely give justice to the injured plaintiff in medical malpractice trials. I was just at a pretrial conference today for a case that will be tried next week. The judge told the defense lawyer and me that one of the issues we were discussing made little difference “because the plaintiffs never win these cases anyway.” Read the May 2007 Michigan Law Review article “Doctors and Juries”. The author reviewed seven articles in medical journals that compared jury verdicts to insurance companies’ own reviews by physician reviewers and concluded that “the studies show that juries favor doctors even more than physician reviewers do. The empirical literature does not support the view that juries are biased in favor of injured plaintiffs.” I have waived a jury trial in every case I have handled during the past five or six years. The doctors’ lawyers have paid the jury fee in every one of those cases because they know that they have a better chance of fooling twelve jurors than a judge who knows what malpractice is. According to the National Practitioner Data Bank, in my state, Wisconsin, there were only four payments made to patients for malpractice for every 1,000 practicing doctors in the state. Last year only two plaintiffs won jury trials in malpractice cases in the entire state. Only 67 people in the state received compensation for injuries suffered by malpractice. The fact is that juries let negligent doctors off the hook much more often than they should. By the way, the definition of malpractice provided by the first person to write a comment is not the law around here or in most states. The standard definition of malpractice is a failure to exercise the degree of skill, care, and judgment usually used by a reasonable doctor of the specialty of the defendant doctor under the same or similar circumstances considering the state of medical practice at the time of the incident.
Malpractice or simply a less than desirable outcome? A breach delivery presents an immediate danger to both the mother and infant. The appropriate medical protocol is to attempt to turn the infant inside the womb. That protocol was followed in this instance. Any parent would be devastated under the circumstances. Their suit may be rooted in anger directed at the physician. One has to aske the question “what happens when a physician does the best he can under the circumstances, but the outcome is bad?” Is that malpractice? There are inherent risks to any type of medical procedure and nothing comes with a 100% guarantee. Even if the physician makes a mistake, it it malpractice? Here’s the legal definition:
“failure of a professional person, as a physician or lawyer, to render proper services through reprehensible ignorance or negligence or through criminal intent, esp. when injury or loss follows; any improper, negligent practice; misconduct or misuse.”
Just because you get a bad outcome doesn’t automatically translate to professional negligence.
Bill: The definition is one thing. How the case is presented to the jury is quite another. Otherwise how do you explain a $10 Million award to the wife of a heart transplant patient who died of complications following a heart attack with his new heart? That person was 76 years old, was living on borrowed time anyway because he had previously undergone a heart transplant, and expired when his new heart failed after a couple of years. Granted, I don’t have the details laid out by the plaintiff in the Trial of the case, but to me the award is excessive and the “malpractice” seems tenuous given the legal definition you quoted. But nevertheless a jury came up with the $10 Million in the litigation lottery. Our system is broken and we all participated in breaking it.
I saw the write-up on the heart attack case in Palm Beach and agree it was another bastardization of a flawed system. The sad reality of our liberal society is that jurys lack the ability to maintain objectivity and want to give people money to make them feel better. Too many times liability/negligence gets ignored. I’d like to see a “professional juror” system akin to Japan’s system. They’re educated, tested, reviewed, and well-paid. I can always dream can’t I?
I have long espoused the idea of a professional jury system, and I guess all of us who could be accused of being ‘insurance insiders’ would agree that a system of professional juries would work best. Try to get that past the Trial Lawyers though. Nice to know there are other dreamers out there.
The reason why the dr. was sued is because the doctor failed to inform the mother that their was a complication before hand and he was going to try to save the baby by positioning the baby to be born head first which was standard procedure.
Okay so maybe the professional jury will not fly but surely there should be some kind of minimum IQ level required. The ability to reason must come into play. The attys love the less than educated ones. Not that educated people make all correct decisions but at least they can understand the more difficult concepts presented.
Wait a minute, EC. 20% of our citizens can’t even locate the U.S. on a globe. What does that tell you about the depth of the jury pool? I’ve been in many trials and am constantly amazed by the slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing component in at least a few jurors on each jury. Based on the current statistic, 2 out of 10 jurors won’t even know where they are……..
Almost exactly one year ago, Wisconsin’s largest medical malpractice insurer (36%), Physicians Insurance Company of Wisconsin, was bought by ProAssurance Corporation for $100 million. Physicians Insurance Company of Wisconsin was a physician-owned insurer that had been paying dividends to its stockholders for years. The doctors who started the company in 1986 made a lot of money. From 1998 through 2004, the company paid dividends of $5.5 million. As I said earlier, the loss ratios for medical malpractice insurers here are extremely low, meaning they are making a lot of money. I can give you hardcopy documentation of every piece of information I have provided to you and any other readers of this.
Mike, here’s the problem. Whether the plaintiffs win or not is, quite honestly, irrelevant. You don’t work for free and neither does your fellow counsel for the defense. The incredible amount of expense needed to defend malpractice cases in the first place, regardless of outcome, is a key component in what drives the insurance premiums for the doctors. Such cases, whether in the name of ‘justice’ or not, have such a detrimental economic effect on healthcare providers, it pains me to see you try to justify suits in the first place. My wife’s own OB/GYN gave up delivering babies in 2006, simply because her premiums tripled, through no fault of her own. It’s ridiculous cases (note – not the verdicts themselves) that drive up these costs. You’re clearly loathe to admit you’re part of a system that has gone ‘suit happy’. I’m not saying that doctors who truly are negligent should not ‘face the music’. But suing over an unwanted outcome is just not acceptable.
Dr. J,
I understand what you are saying, but in my experience, lawyers do not file cases that do not have merit. To do so would be a big mistake. Plaintiffs’ lawyers do not get compensated unless there is a successful conclusion to the case. I do not know where you practice, but around here the insurance companies for the doctors do not settle ANY case unless the company is absolutely convinced that the doctor is going to lose the case. From my contacts with other plaintiff’s lawyers around the country, I can assure you that the attitude of the insurance carriers is to defend any case that has of chance of being successfully defended. With the defendants winning 80-90% of the cases that go to trial, explain to me why a lawyer would file a case that did not have merit. And if you think that a defense verdict means that the case did not have merit, give me a call and I will tell you of countless cases that would shock you regarding the negligence of the doctors, with the jury finding that the doctor had not been negligent. I lost a case last year in which the negligence was horrible, resulting in the death of a 32-year-old man from a pulmonary embolism after he had gone to the clinic three times in ten days complaining of calf pain and severe shortness of breath. I had two of the leading authorities in the world testify about the negligence of the defendant. I spent more than 600 hours of time and $125,000 on the case. If that is what happens with a strong case, why would I ever take a weak case? The judge who conducted yesterday’s pretrial conference told the defense lawyer and me that the last three medical malpractice trials over which he had presided had been overwhelming cases of negligence, yet the jurors in each of those cases found no medical negligence. Your comment that lawyers are “suit happy” could not be further from the truth. Of the thousands of lawyers in Wisconsin, there are probably about twenty who are willing to take on a medical negligence case because they are so difficult to win, even with a clear case of negligence, and are always incredibly expensive to pursue. Last year there were only 204 medical malpractice cases filed in Wisconsin, a state with 5.5 million people. As you know, in 1999 the Institute of Medicine determined that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die IN THE HOSPITAL each year because of medical negligence. If people who die as a result of negligence occurring outside of the hospital setting are included, the number would be much higher. And this does not include people who are injured, just people who die. If the report, which was based upon a Harvard study in which doctors reviewed hospital charts to conclude that one percent of hospitalized patients are injured or die as a result of medical negligence, is correct, it is evident that only a miniscule percentage of people who are injured actually are able to find a lawyer to pursue a claim. When I talk with other lawyers, including defense lawyers, who do medical malpractice work, we laugh at the incorrect public perception about the legal system. In reality, the cause of malpractice cases being filed is malpractice having been committed. To its credit, the medical community has reacted to the Institute of Medicine report and has taken steps to improve the quality of medical care. Recent medical journal articles have admitted that the efforts have only been partially successful. That, in my opinion and in the opinion of many of the doctors who have studied the problem, is the answer to high malpractice premiums.
I wish we have more people like Bill Reed and Clm Mgr and less people like Mike and this country and our legal system would be SO much better off. This is your typical money grubbing case by a couple of gold diggers and they won. Glad to see the verdict was thrown out.
Mike, your post has to be a joke. Lawyers file junk lawsuits constantly grubbing for money. I know many attorneys who are decent people, but far too many are the sterotype legal sharks. Your post is naive at best, a total fabrication or a piece of trial lawyer propoganda at worst. You won’t find much sympathy for your postion on this site. Go back to findlaw where the trial lawyers can lie to each other in comfort.
Dr. J,
Call medical malpractice defense lawyers in Wisconsin and ask any of them if they see a lot of frivolous lawsuits being filed. I do not know where you live or how you are getting your information, but I can tell you that lawyers do not waste their time and money filing frivolous lawsuits. When the loss ratios for the Wisconsin medical malpractice insurers for 2003 through 2005 have been 36%, 40%, and 41%, the few lawyers who are willing to represent injured people in these cases are not exactly bringing the insurance industry to its knees.
Now I can tell you are a shill for the trial lawyers. Quote phoney statisticts all you want. Nobody believes you. Sadly that’s probably not true. Too many people buy into your baloney.
Oh yeah, if it’s so profitable why have so many carriers gotten out of the business? That question has been asked a lot and I have never heard a satisfactory explanation. Your turn to try.
Have you ever served on a jury? I’m no knuckle dragger (well, a little), but thinks look different up there even in the simplest of cases. Tough job. I don’t like the idea of professional jurors, but it might be a good idea in many ways.
I am a lawyer who represents plaintiffs in medical malpractice cases. The comments regarding this article could not be further from the truth. The case at issue had to be based upon actual malpractice supported by testimony of an obstetrician. Otherwise, the judge would not have allowed the case to get to the jury. Contrary to the comments, jurors very rarely give justice to the injured plaintiff in medical malpractice trials. I was just at a pretrial conference today for a case that will be tried next week. The judge told the defense lawyer and me that one of the issues we were discussing made little difference “because the plaintiffs never win these cases anyway.” Read the May 2007 Michigan Law Review article “Doctors and Juries”. The author reviewed seven articles in medical journals that compared jury verdicts to insurance companies’ own reviews by physician reviewers and concluded that “the studies show that juries favor doctors even more than physician reviewers do. The empirical literature does not support the view that juries are biased in favor of injured plaintiffs.” I have waived a jury trial in every case I have handled during the past five or six years. The doctors’ lawyers have paid the jury fee in every one of those cases because they know that they have a better chance of fooling twelve jurors than a judge who knows what malpractice is. According to the National Practitioner Data Bank, in my state, Wisconsin, there were only four payments made to patients for malpractice for every 1,000 practicing doctors in the state. Last year only two plaintiffs won jury trials in malpractice cases in the entire state. Only 67 people in the state received compensation for injuries suffered by malpractice. The fact is that juries let negligent doctors off the hook much more often than they should. By the way, the definition of malpractice provided by the first person to write a comment is not the law around here or in most states. The standard definition of malpractice is a failure to exercise the degree of skill, care, and judgment usually used by a reasonable doctor of the specialty of the defendant doctor under the same or similar circumstances considering the state of medical practice at the time of the incident.
Malpractice or simply a less than desirable outcome? A breach delivery presents an immediate danger to both the mother and infant. The appropriate medical protocol is to attempt to turn the infant inside the womb. That protocol was followed in this instance. Any parent would be devastated under the circumstances. Their suit may be rooted in anger directed at the physician. One has to aske the question “what happens when a physician does the best he can under the circumstances, but the outcome is bad?” Is that malpractice? There are inherent risks to any type of medical procedure and nothing comes with a 100% guarantee. Even if the physician makes a mistake, it it malpractice? Here’s the legal definition:
“failure of a professional person, as a physician or lawyer, to render proper services through reprehensible ignorance or negligence or through criminal intent, esp. when injury or loss follows; any improper, negligent practice; misconduct or misuse.”
Just because you get a bad outcome doesn’t automatically translate to professional negligence.
Bill: The definition is one thing. How the case is presented to the jury is quite another. Otherwise how do you explain a $10 Million award to the wife of a heart transplant patient who died of complications following a heart attack with his new heart? That person was 76 years old, was living on borrowed time anyway because he had previously undergone a heart transplant, and expired when his new heart failed after a couple of years. Granted, I don’t have the details laid out by the plaintiff in the Trial of the case, but to me the award is excessive and the “malpractice” seems tenuous given the legal definition you quoted. But nevertheless a jury came up with the $10 Million in the litigation lottery. Our system is broken and we all participated in breaking it.
I saw the write-up on the heart attack case in Palm Beach and agree it was another bastardization of a flawed system. The sad reality of our liberal society is that jurys lack the ability to maintain objectivity and want to give people money to make them feel better. Too many times liability/negligence gets ignored. I’d like to see a “professional juror” system akin to Japan’s system. They’re educated, tested, reviewed, and well-paid. I can always dream can’t I?
I have long espoused the idea of a professional jury system, and I guess all of us who could be accused of being ‘insurance insiders’ would agree that a system of professional juries would work best. Try to get that past the Trial Lawyers though. Nice to know there are other dreamers out there.
The reason why the dr. was sued is because the doctor failed to inform the mother that their was a complication before hand and he was going to try to save the baby by positioning the baby to be born head first which was standard procedure.
Okay so maybe the professional jury will not fly but surely there should be some kind of minimum IQ level required. The ability to reason must come into play. The attys love the less than educated ones. Not that educated people make all correct decisions but at least they can understand the more difficult concepts presented.
Wait a minute, EC. 20% of our citizens can’t even locate the U.S. on a globe. What does that tell you about the depth of the jury pool? I’ve been in many trials and am constantly amazed by the slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing component in at least a few jurors on each jury. Based on the current statistic, 2 out of 10 jurors won’t even know where they are……..
Almost exactly one year ago, Wisconsin’s largest medical malpractice insurer (36%), Physicians Insurance Company of Wisconsin, was bought by ProAssurance Corporation for $100 million. Physicians Insurance Company of Wisconsin was a physician-owned insurer that had been paying dividends to its stockholders for years. The doctors who started the company in 1986 made a lot of money. From 1998 through 2004, the company paid dividends of $5.5 million. As I said earlier, the loss ratios for medical malpractice insurers here are extremely low, meaning they are making a lot of money. I can give you hardcopy documentation of every piece of information I have provided to you and any other readers of this.
Mike…Thank you for a very concise and informative view. (and not one word concerning “stupid jurors”)
Kudos to you!!
Mike, here’s the problem. Whether the plaintiffs win or not is, quite honestly, irrelevant. You don’t work for free and neither does your fellow counsel for the defense. The incredible amount of expense needed to defend malpractice cases in the first place, regardless of outcome, is a key component in what drives the insurance premiums for the doctors. Such cases, whether in the name of ‘justice’ or not, have such a detrimental economic effect on healthcare providers, it pains me to see you try to justify suits in the first place. My wife’s own OB/GYN gave up delivering babies in 2006, simply because her premiums tripled, through no fault of her own. It’s ridiculous cases (note – not the verdicts themselves) that drive up these costs. You’re clearly loathe to admit you’re part of a system that has gone ‘suit happy’. I’m not saying that doctors who truly are negligent should not ‘face the music’. But suing over an unwanted outcome is just not acceptable.
Dr. J,
I understand what you are saying, but in my experience, lawyers do not file cases that do not have merit. To do so would be a big mistake. Plaintiffs’ lawyers do not get compensated unless there is a successful conclusion to the case. I do not know where you practice, but around here the insurance companies for the doctors do not settle ANY case unless the company is absolutely convinced that the doctor is going to lose the case. From my contacts with other plaintiff’s lawyers around the country, I can assure you that the attitude of the insurance carriers is to defend any case that has of chance of being successfully defended. With the defendants winning 80-90% of the cases that go to trial, explain to me why a lawyer would file a case that did not have merit. And if you think that a defense verdict means that the case did not have merit, give me a call and I will tell you of countless cases that would shock you regarding the negligence of the doctors, with the jury finding that the doctor had not been negligent. I lost a case last year in which the negligence was horrible, resulting in the death of a 32-year-old man from a pulmonary embolism after he had gone to the clinic three times in ten days complaining of calf pain and severe shortness of breath. I had two of the leading authorities in the world testify about the negligence of the defendant. I spent more than 600 hours of time and $125,000 on the case. If that is what happens with a strong case, why would I ever take a weak case? The judge who conducted yesterday’s pretrial conference told the defense lawyer and me that the last three medical malpractice trials over which he had presided had been overwhelming cases of negligence, yet the jurors in each of those cases found no medical negligence. Your comment that lawyers are “suit happy” could not be further from the truth. Of the thousands of lawyers in Wisconsin, there are probably about twenty who are willing to take on a medical negligence case because they are so difficult to win, even with a clear case of negligence, and are always incredibly expensive to pursue. Last year there were only 204 medical malpractice cases filed in Wisconsin, a state with 5.5 million people. As you know, in 1999 the Institute of Medicine determined that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die IN THE HOSPITAL each year because of medical negligence. If people who die as a result of negligence occurring outside of the hospital setting are included, the number would be much higher. And this does not include people who are injured, just people who die. If the report, which was based upon a Harvard study in which doctors reviewed hospital charts to conclude that one percent of hospitalized patients are injured or die as a result of medical negligence, is correct, it is evident that only a miniscule percentage of people who are injured actually are able to find a lawyer to pursue a claim. When I talk with other lawyers, including defense lawyers, who do medical malpractice work, we laugh at the incorrect public perception about the legal system. In reality, the cause of malpractice cases being filed is malpractice having been committed. To its credit, the medical community has reacted to the Institute of Medicine report and has taken steps to improve the quality of medical care. Recent medical journal articles have admitted that the efforts have only been partially successful. That, in my opinion and in the opinion of many of the doctors who have studied the problem, is the answer to high malpractice premiums.
I wish we have more people like Bill Reed and Clm Mgr and less people like Mike and this country and our legal system would be SO much better off. This is your typical money grubbing case by a couple of gold diggers and they won. Glad to see the verdict was thrown out.
Mike, your post has to be a joke. Lawyers file junk lawsuits constantly grubbing for money. I know many attorneys who are decent people, but far too many are the sterotype legal sharks. Your post is naive at best, a total fabrication or a piece of trial lawyer propoganda at worst. You won’t find much sympathy for your postion on this site. Go back to findlaw where the trial lawyers can lie to each other in comfort.
Dr. J,
Call medical malpractice defense lawyers in Wisconsin and ask any of them if they see a lot of frivolous lawsuits being filed. I do not know where you live or how you are getting your information, but I can tell you that lawyers do not waste their time and money filing frivolous lawsuits. When the loss ratios for the Wisconsin medical malpractice insurers for 2003 through 2005 have been 36%, 40%, and 41%, the few lawyers who are willing to represent injured people in these cases are not exactly bringing the insurance industry to its knees.
Now I can tell you are a shill for the trial lawyers. Quote phoney statisticts all you want. Nobody believes you. Sadly that’s probably not true. Too many people buy into your baloney.
Oh yeah, if it’s so profitable why have so many carriers gotten out of the business? That question has been asked a lot and I have never heard a satisfactory explanation. Your turn to try.