Personal Injury & Wrongful Death

Our medical malpractice attorneys are frequently forced to decline cases which have merit from a liability standpoint, but due to caps on the amount of recovery cannot be justified in economic terms.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times ran a story concerning a 72 year old woman who entered Stanford University Medical Center for double knee replacement surgery in April. Four days later, she was dead. Her son, an anesthesiologist, felt that the case was a classic case of medical malpractice. After the operation, his mother developed sharp abdominal pain which she described as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. The hospital failed to diagnose the cause of her pain and continued to treat her with pain relievers. Her vital signs became unstable and she was moved to an intensive care unit, but she died of complications from an undiagnosed and untreated bowel obstruction. (more…)

Serious injury lawyers like ourselves often hear clients involved in serious accidents tell us that they had “full coverage” at the time of the accident and that they therefore have “excellent” insurance protection. The vast majority of the time, this is not the case at all. This is because the term “full coverage” means that one has the coverage one is minimally required by law to possess. Full coverage does not mean adequate coverage nor does it mean excellent coverage. It means minimally required coverage required by law.
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Our medical malpractice attorneys are many times forced to turn away cases against emergency rooms where the patient is injured by clear negligence. This is caused by the gross negligence standard for emergency departments adopted by the Legislature in 2005.

With the Georgia Legislature meeting this week, Senators from both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, have joined to co-sponsor Senate Bill No. 286. This bill is designed to amend the provision of the so-called Tort Reform Bill initially passed in 2005, which essentially gave emergency rooms immunity from law suits. As part of the February 2005 bill, patients alleging malpractice in emergency rooms must prove gross negligence. Gross negligence is most often characterized under Georgia law as a reckless disregard for the safety of a patient, and in many cases has been interpreted to mean intentional harm.
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Our firm is working on a police chase metro Atlanta case involving an officer who has been in two separate high speed pursuit cases resulting in two deaths. We have learned in this case that another officer in the same department has also been involved in two other accidents that have resulted in four deaths. Thus, between these two officers within the same police department there have been 4 high speed pursuit cases we know of involving six deaths. Is the public being protected when police officers engage in these high speed police chases? We think not.
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Our serious injury attorneys frequently see cases in which insurance companies refuse to pay valid claims and then turn on their insureds accusing them of fraud.

Last Tuesday, the Western Missouri Court of Appeals upheld a jury verdict of nearly $8.5 million against State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company for breach of contract claims and malicious prosecution against a claim holder. The case originated in 1997 when Jennie Hampton reported that her vehicle had been stolen and filed a claim with her insurer, State Farm.
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The consumer group, Public Citizen filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asking the court to force the Food and Drug Administration to act upon a petition the consumer group filed with the agency 16 months ago. According to the lawsuit, despite long-standing evidence that fluoroquinolone antibiotics can cause tendon ruptures, the FDA has failed to increase its warnings to patients and physicians about the dangers of the medicines.
The FDA failed to respond to the Public Citizen asked
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In a study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors concluded that in nearly one-third of cases of sudden cardiac arrest occurring in hospitals, the staff takes too long to respond, greatly increasing the risk of brain damage and death. The authors research indicates that these delays contribute to thousands of deaths a year in the United States alone.

The study was based on the records of 6,789 patients at 369 different hospitals whose hearts suffered from conditions that could be reversed by the use of an electronic defibrillator.
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A few months ago there was a large amount of news coverage regarding the death of a woman from eating contaminated oysters at an Atlanta restaurant. Now, the Georgia Department of Agriculture is alerting consumers that norovirus has been found in some raw oysters harvested in Louisiana. Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Irvin announced that raw oysters harvested from the West Karako Bay Section of Growing Area 3 in Louisiana from Dec. 3 through Dec. 21 may possibly be contaminated with norovirus. Inspectors are looking for these oysters in Georgia retail and wholesale facilities.
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The Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning about fentanyl pain patches. The fentanyl skin patch contains fentanyl, a potent narcotic. The skin patch was approved by FDA in 1990 for use in patients with persistent, moderate-to-severe pain who have become opioid tolerant – meaning that they have been using another strong opioid narcotic pain medicine around-the-clock, and have been using the medicine regularly for a week or longer. The skin patch is most commonly prescribed for patients with cancer.

The FDA has continued to receive reports of deaths and life-threatening side effects after doctors have inappropriately prescribed the patch or patients have incorrectly used it.
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Drug manufacturer Genentech has been involved in a dispute with physicians over the use of its drug Avastin. Ophthalmologists became concerned last October when Genentech announced it was changing the distribution channels for Avastin, which would make it much more difficult for patients to receive the drug. Doctors accused the company of making the change to force the use of its more expensive drug, Lucentis.
Lucentis is approved to treat macular degeneration, a condition that causes blindness and is encountered frequently in elderly patients. It
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