One question that has remained unanswered is whether Maryland’s new bad faith law is retroactive. On Dec. 17, 2007, U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz ruled that the Maryland legislature intended Maryland’s new first-party bad faith law to be retroactive. In Schwaber v. Hartford, a case involving insurance coverage…
In March, I wrote a blog post discussing whether it makes sense for to videotape medical exams by the defendant’s lawyer’s doctor. Last week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a plaintiff who is required to submit to an “independent medical examination” (hereinafter the more honest “defense medical exam”) may…
On Monday, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts overturned the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a woman against a physician who had failed to warn his patient of the side effects of a medication. These side effects had caused the patient to lose consciousness at the wheel and kill…
Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Riegel v. Medtronic. The issue is whether the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act forecloses state law personal injury lawsuits for injuries from the design, manufacture, and labeling of a Medtronic medical device that the Food and Drug Administration initially granted a pre-market…
I read this weekend a crazy story about a Tennessee medical malpractice case. The plaintiff sued a Tennessee lawyer for legal malpractice for botching a case which he supposedly should have won. The legal negligence case settled for $750,000 which means, if logic and reason were at all involved in…
I stumbled on a 2003 study titled “Race Poverty, and American Tort Awards,” written by economists Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University in Virginia and Eric Helland of Claremont-McKenna College in California published in the Journal of Legal Studies that offer some interesting observations on how race and poverty levels…
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new product for malpractice lawyers called MedMal Reports. This company creates a report of the expected medical malpractice payout for a case based on the National Practitioner’s Data Bank. I received an email from MedMal Reports Chief Economist, Dr. David M. Frankel,…
The West Virginia Supreme Court, applying West Virginia’s medical malpractice cap, affirmed the trial court’s decision to cut a $10 million medical malpractice verdict against a West Virginia hospital and one of its doctors down to $1 million. (This is the same thing that happened to us in Maryland 10…
Doctors may have a new opponent in their battle for lower medical malpractice premiums: the state of Maryland. As I wrote last month, Maryland has been paying subsidies to doctors to the tune of $80 million over the past three years as a part of the medical malpractice “reform” bill…
I had a jury trial in an auto accident case in Anne Arundel County against State Farm last week. It was a soft tissue injury case with over a year of treatment. It was a case we inherited from another lawyer who retired last year. The biggest weakness of the…