Nursing homes provide care for some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Our legal system therefore holds them to a very high standard. When a nursing home fails to provide adequate care to a resident, it could be held liable for resulting injuries. The common-law theory of negligence,…
As was expected for several months, Melissa Rivers, the sole daughter of the late comedian and T.V. personality Joan Rivers, has filed a medical malpractice and wrongful death lawsuit in connection with her mother’s death on September 4, 2014. The suit, filed on January 26, 2015, alleges that Rivers unnecessarily…
For years, liability insurance companies, doctors and hospitals have been attempting to establish “tort reform” in the State of New York. In fact, Governor Cuomo had a provision in his initial budget in 2012 which would have capped non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000, regardless of the severity…
The New York Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a bill which would prohibit physicians and other medical malpractice defendants from interviewing a plaintiff’s non-party, later-treating doctors in private. Senate Bill 3296-A is designed to overturn the 2007 New York Court of Appeals decision in Arons v. Jutkowitz that said a…
Courts that specialize in medical malpractice cases are now increasing in New York City. The initial program was started in Bronx County approximately 15 years ago through the supervision of Justice Douglas McKeon in response to the filing of 4,000 medical malpractice cases annually. The idea was to reduce Court…
According to a study by the consumer protection group Public Citizen, medical malpractice awards are at an all time low in the United States. Public Citizen used data collected from the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), which started tracking payments made in medical malpractice cases in 1990. The 2010 report,…
I recently read an article in Bloomberg online which confirms what most personal injury and medical malpractice attorneys know to be true: hospital errors are vastly underreported, with a federal study finding that a full 90% of patient injuries are not recorded. The most common injuries are pressure sores and…
According to a study in the Archives of Surgery, as reported in the the New York Times October 19, 2010 edition, from 2002 through mid-2008 in Colorado, surgeons reported an astounding 25 operations on the wrong patient, and 107 surgical procedures on the wrong body part. The data was drawn…
On December 12, 2008, a jury in a Westchester County medical malpractice case awarded a 7 million dollar verdict to the family of Theresa Capwell, an Orange County mother of three who died on September 10, 2001. Ms. Capwell had been admitted to Westchester Medical Center on September 18, 2000…
You have decided to have elective surgery, such as breast implants, a nose job, or radial keratotomy. Before the procedure is performed, the surgeon (or more likely his nurse or assistant) will hand you a document which contains a long list of potential complications and risks of the procedure you…