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New York Judges Aim to Curb Medical Malpractice Litigation Costs

As part of its health-care bill, the Obama Administration included money for grants to states to launch projects aimed at curbing costs associated with medical malpractice litigation.

The New York Times today takes a look at a federally-funded project in New York that gets judges involved early on in malpractice cases in an effort to settle the cases and save court costs.

The way it works is that a judge will hold a settlement conference with lawyers but not their clients often only months after a malpractice case is filed.

The judge will attempt to cajole a settlement that is likely to be less than a jury would award but that is paid our far earlier than a verdict, and without having to go through a lengthy appeals process, according to the Times.

So far, New York city courts have used the method called judge-directed negotiation, but the approach is expected to spread to courts outside the city this fall.

Harvard professor Michelle M. Mello told the Times that the New York program represented a major cultural change in malpractice cases. “Ordinarily when the parties come to a settlement conference, it’s late in the game,” she said. “It’s often a pro forma exercise rather than an attempt to grapple with the tricky issues in the case.

Source: Wall Street Journal (blog)

PointofLaw.com | PointOfLaw Forum: Illusory medical malpractice ...

by Ted Frank

The The New York Times documents a pilot program of "judge-directed negotiation" in New York where medical malpractice cases are assigned to an experienced settlement judge early in the process, one of many programs the Obama administration supports as an alternative to damage caps . It's certainly a good thing when truly injured plaintiffs can recover faster. And the program can certainly reduce litigation expenses by allowing the parties to come to a quicker assessment of the value of the case.

But that value is still dictated by irrational factors such as the expected sympathy of the jury (as one anecdote in the story reveals without any comment on the resulting injustice) and previous outsized awards given by New York juries. Without a fix of that underlying problem in New York law, New York doctors are still going to be facing outsized malpractice expenses. And because, as Lester Brickman documents , plaintiffs' attorneys' fees are rarely reduced by the fact that the attorney reached settlement quickly rather than after lengthy litigation, the program may have the perverse effect of making relatively meritless medical malpractice litigation more profitable. A federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality official estimates a $1 billion annual savings from the program, but it's far from clear that he has accounted for the countervailing effects: if you make litigation cheaper, you get more of it.

Source: PointofLaw.com | PointOfLaw Forum: Illusory medical malpractice ...

Juror in medical malpractice lawsuit charged with soliciting ...

by admin

In a rarely surprising twist, a juror was arrested in a center of a medical malpractice hearing and indicted of soliciting bribes in sequence to gain plaintiff Bridget Wigand’s verdict.

Wigand is suing her medicine in a medical malpractice box that proceeded to hearing in New York. As a jury neared deliberations, Wigand’s father was contacted by a male who claimed to have critical information regarding to a case. He concluded to accommodate a male and was repelled to commend that it was Deonarine Persaud, one of a jurors on a case.

Persaud claimed that he could lean a jury into producing a plaintiff’s outcome in a box in sell for 5% of a financial award. The plaintiff and her family went to a police, and Persaud was arrested in a midst of a malpractice trial. He was charged with bungle by a juror and soliciting a bribe. Wigand’s box was announced a mistrial, and will start again from scratch.

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