Colorado Law Blog

Found 4/13/07 on the front page of the website for The National Law Journal, a link to an article titled:

How to make your family vacation more productive

With spring around the corner, it's time to pack the kids in the car for a family roadtrip. But don't let that stop you from keeping the clock running on your billable hours.

The above lead links to an article explaining how lawyers can pack in billable hours while touring with the family- does this suggest a loss of balance - or maybe sheer looniness- for those firms obsessed with billable hours?

Posted by Linda Chalat at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Juries still side with doctors in about half of medical malpractice cases where strong evidence of negligence is presented. This is old news to those of us who handle medical malpractice claims on behalf of patients, but now it is “official” according to a new review of 30 years of medical malpractice jury verdicts.

The study, by professor Philip Peters Jr. at Columbia School of Law, also concludes that plaintiffs win only 10% to 20% of cases experts believe they should lose. Defendants prevail in 70% of cases considered close calls.

Peters notes several explanations for juries' pro-defendant behavior that warrant further study, including juries' skepticism of patients who file lawsuits against their doctors and the possibility that defendants usually have more experienced lawyers and better experts.

The study also theorizes that juries take the burden of proof seriously in medical malpractice cases, which leads them to side with doctors when both sides have credible experts.

Peters concludes by noting that medical malpractice reform "should not be driven by the mistaken assumption that juries treat physicians unfairly." Peters' Doctors & Juries study will be published in the May 2007 issue of the Michigan Law Review.

Posted by Linda Chalat at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After a five-week trial, in King County, Washington, jury on last Friday awarded $14 million to a 27-year-old skier who was paralyzed after dropping 37 feet from a ski jump at the Summit at Snoqualmie.

Kenny Salvini, of Lake Tapps, was 23 years old when he went off the jump at the Central Terrain Park. During the trial, testimony indicated that the man who built the jump “eyeballed it with a Sno-Cat" rather than engineering a design.

Engineers and an aeronautics professor from the University of California, Davis, testified that the jump was improperly designed and featured a short landing area, Connelly said, adding that ski jumps are supposed to be sloped so that energy from a vertical jump is transferred into a skier's forward motion on landing.

Other snowboarders were injured on the same jump in the weeks before Salvini's accident, including a snowboarder who broke his back. A week after Salvini was injured, 19-year-old Peter Melrose of Bellevue died going off a different jump at the same terrain park. Evidence of 15 earlier accidents was admitted into evidence but nothing was done by ski operators to fix or close the dangerous jumps.

The full jury award was for about $31 million, but the amount was decreased to $14 million after calculating "the comparative fault" of Salvini and "the inherent risk of the sport."

Before he was injured, Salvini, now a quadriplegic, was captain of the wrestling team at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, where he graduated in engineering technology. His mother is now his full-time caregiver. According to testimony, over the course of his life, Salvini's medical needs are estimated to cost between $23 million and $26 million.

Posted by Linda Chalat at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

U.S. hospitals increased the number of “patient safety incidents” by three percent overall from 2003 to 2005, and where you seek treatment may make a huge difference in the outcome. The error gap between the nation's best- and worst-performing hospitals remained wide, a report released Monday found. America's top rated treatment centers had 40 percent lower rates of medical errors than the poorest-performing hospitals, the study showed.

The fourth annual HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study, put out by HealthGrades, an independent health care ratings company, examined over 40 million Medicare hospitalization records at almost 5,000 hospitals from 2003 to 2005.

The study found that there were 1.16 million patient safety incidents among Medicare patients during the three years of the study. That works out to an incidence rate of 2.86 percent. During those three years, there were 247,662 potentially preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals. Medicare patients involved in one or more safety incidents had a 25 percent chance of dying. The excess cost to Medicare associated with patient safety incidents was $8.6 billion from 2003 to 2005.

Sixteen types of patient-safety incidents were reviewed, and the rate of occurrence for ten types increased over the three years of the study, by an average of almost 12 percent. The greatest increases were in post-operative sepsis (about 34.3 percent); post-operative respiratory failure (18.7 percent); and selected infections due to medical care (about 12.2 percent).

Incidents with the highest occurrence rates were decubitus ulcer (pressure sores or commonly called bed sores); failure to rescue; and post-operative respiratory failure.
If all hospitals had performed at the same level as the top-rated hospitals, about 206,286 patient safety incidents and 34,393 Medicare patient deaths could have been avoided, resulting in $1.74 billion in savings.

To avoid becoming a statistic the next time you or a loved one visits a hospital, you may which to consider these recommendations:

• If you have a choice, choose a hospital at which many patients have the procedure or surgery you need. Research shows that patients tend to have better results when they are treated in hospitals that have a great deal of experience with their condition.

• If you are in a hospital, consider asking all health care workers who have direct contact with you whether they have washed their hands. Handwashing is an important way to prevent the spread of infections in hospitals.

• When you are being discharged from the hospital, ask your doctor to explain the treatment plan you will use at home. This includes learning about your medicines and finding out when you can get back to your regular activities. Research shows that at discharge time, doctors think their patients understand more than they really do about what they should or should not do when they return home.
  

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