Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

It is a sad state of affairs when you can find more information about the people you hire to hang your drywall than you can about the person who will be doing your bypass surgery. For one thing, the consequences of utilizing the wrong doctor can be life threatening. And when it comes to medical malpractice, it’s the repeat offenders that you have to watch out for.

Before they locked the public out of the NPDB, a group called Public Citizen took a look at the records and determined that of all the cases of medical malpractice that resulted in verdicts or settlements, about 50% of those instances of medical malpractice were committed by only about 5% of the doctors. In other words, there are a few bad doctors out there, but they happen to be really bad. Since 1990, about 4.8% of practicing doctors have had two or more medical malpractice cases go against them. 1.7% of those doctors have made three or more malpractice cases, and combined this 1.7% accounts for a little over a quarter of all medical malpractice payouts.

If your doctor or surgeon was part of the 1.7%, wouldn’t you want to know? If you had a surgery scheduled, wouldn’t you want to know if the person cutting you open had a history of medical malpractice, particularly if they had made three or more medical malpractice payouts? One malpractice payout can be considered an anomaly. Two would make us suspicious. Three or more is a sure sign of someone we would question before going under this person’s care.

Here are just a few of the doctors and surgeons whose records have been sealed from public view (all of these were taken directly from the Public Citizen report):

• Physician Number 94358, licensed in New Jersey, settled or lost 33 medical malpractice suits involving improper diagnosis or treatment between 1988 and 1993, inflicting over $400,000 in disability costs to his patients. This doctor has not been disciplined by authorities in New Jersey.

• Physician Number 64625, licensed in Pennsylvania, paid 24 medical malpractice claims involving improper performance of surgery between 1989 and 2001. Damages to this doctor’s patients exceeded $370,000. This doctor has never been disciplined by Pennsylvania authorities.

• Physician Number 125457, while licensed in Nevada, paid 5 malpractice claims involving improper performance of surgery between 1995 and 1997, with damages totaling $2.3 million. Recent news accounts have reported that doctors are fleeing from Las Vegas to other states to avoid high malpractice insurance premiums. Physician 125457 was ahead of the curve in moving his practice to California. There he paid another 8 malpractice claims with damages exceeding $7.5 million. This doctor has never been disciplined by authorities in either Nevada or California.

• Physician Number 37949, licensed in Texas, settled or lost 13 medical malpractice suits involving improper treatment or improper performance of surgery between 1990 and 1997. Two of the suits involved the same allegation—a foreign body left in the patient during surgery. Damages to this doctor’s patients exceeded $2 million. This doctor has never been disciplined by authorities in Texas.

What is sticking out at us here (aside from the obvious multiple cases of medical malpractice) is that none of these doctors were disciplined. Not by the American Medical Association, not by their state medical boards, not by anyone. Thanks to the Department of Health and Human Services for closing our eyes so we can’t tell if our doctor is one of the “fortunate” who has something to hide.

Tort reform organizations like to use the word “lawsuit lottery,” as if malpractice victims were actually quite lucky to be able to get injured by their doctor and sue them. We can tell you with great certainty that there is no such thing as a “lawsuit lottery,” as every single one of our medical malpractice clients would rather have their lives back to normal rather than fight through a multi-year malpractice trial. So no, there is not a “lawsuit lottery.” But because the National Practitioner Data Bank has been shuttered, there is now a “physician lottery.” Who knows who you might get when you book a surgery? Who knows what you might get when your doctor writes a prescription? Your doctor or surgeon might be the model of competence and professionalism, but then again, he might not be. As of right now, you have no way of knowing.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice injury firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people in Maryland, Washington, D.C. or Virginia who have been injured due to the negligent actions of a doctor, surgeon or other medical professional. If you or a loved one has been injured because of medical malpractice, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

One particularly glaring example of this sort of thing is called a SLAPP suit. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation. A more understandable way of putting it would be to call it a “bury the defendant in legal costs to get him to shut up” lawsuit. As a small scale example, let’s say that a college student gets his car towed, even though he had the right to park his car where he did. This student then has to pay around $120 bucks to get a car back that should not have been towed. He then goes home and starts a Facebook page entitled “This Towing Company is Terrible.” Soon, the Facebook page has 800 people who like it, and the college student finds himself on the receiving end of a $750,000 lawsuit from the towing company.

The fact that the college student has every legal right to post or write or say whatever he wants thanks to the First Amendment means that this case should not have been filed in the first place. Nor is it likely that the college student has $750,000. If this lawsuit were to be successfully taken to its conclusion, the towing company is not likely to receive anything from the college student except ramen noodles and half of a twelve pack of Milwaukee’s Best. But that is not the point of the lawsuit. Court cases cost money, particularly if you are the one being sued. The towing company has the money to hire an attorney to prosecute the case. The college student most certainly does not have the money to hire a defense lawyer.  So he would have two options: beg for a settlement or go broke fighting the case that he would eventually win.

If that sounds like an unlikely scenario, bear in mind that all of this has actually happened to a student in Michigan, as reported in The New York Times. Justin Kurtz is staring down bankruptcy because he dared to speak out against a company that towed his car.

And it isn’t just towing companies that have engaged in these lawsuits. Property developers have filed them against citizens groups.Fast food chains have filed them against environmental activists.Religions have filed SLAPP’s against people who criticize them. Titans of industry. Big Business. In other words, the exact same groups and organizations that howl and moan and legislate against “lawsuit abuse” have no real qualms about actually engaging in lawsuit abuse. What else would you call filing a case that you know you can’t win?

When you go to the American Tort Reform Association website and type “SLAPP “into the search engine, you get no results, which we find strange considering that this organization purports to be against lawsuit abuse. Maybe they have a different definition of the word “abuse.” Maybe “abuse” means “when non-wealthy individuals dare to use the court system.” Maybe “abuse” means “any legal action where we aren’t the plaintiffs.” Regardless of which glossary the tort reformers are working from, we can certainly tell a double standard when we see it.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently helping residents of Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. who have been injured in car accidents, bicycle accidents, pedestrian accidents and cases of medical malpractice, as well as any instance where someone was injured due to the actions of someone else. If you or a loved one has been injured due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg & Bederman today for a free legal consultation.

Cars with transponders are disappearing from parking lots and driveways just as fast as cars with alarms, clubs and OnStar. But the one big difference between the earlier thefts and the thefts that are happening now is that insurance companies are often refusing to cover the owners of cars with transponder systems. They are doing so on the grounds that they believe transponder technology to be unbreakable, so they are essentially making the assumption that everyone who has had their cars stolen is lying.

A 2006 article in Wireddetailed this problem quite clearly. There are multiple instances in this article where people had their cars stolen only to be treated like criminals themselves by the insurance companies. Most specifically, there is the story of Emad Wasseff, who got grilled by insurance adjusters over everything from the state of his finances to his marital troubles and still ended up paying around $800 a month for a car that he didn’t own anymore.

We found this article particularly interesting for a few reasons; Insurers know absolutely everything there is to know about cars. They know the fuel economies, the engine sizes, and safety ratings. They know how cars perform in certain types of weather, and even what the likelihood of hitting a deer is in every state in America. And you can bet that they know when transponder technology isn’t working. While we can’t comment on every case like this, we know enough about insurance companies to know that they put a lot of effort into avoiding claims that are often completely legitimate.

The second reason we found this article interesting is because we think it might have a direct bearing on quite a few Mazda 3’s that were sold in North America between 2004 and 2007. It turns out that these particular models had a defect in their door locks that made them incredibly easy to break into. You didn’t need slim Jims or lock picks or any sort of James Bond technology. All you needed was to drive your shoulder into a spot on the driver side door and it would simply pop open.

Quite a few of these cars were equipped with the so called “unbreakable” transponder technology, so while simply hot-wiring the car wasn’t necessarily an option, there are all sorts of ways to get around it, particularly if you can use the defect to enter the car multiple times. For instance, many independent companies sell blank transponder keys for Mazda 3’s, complete with programming instructions. The claim is that only an automotive locksmith or dealership can do the programming, but we have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t exactly a necessity. After all, having automotive skills does not necessarily mean that you will use them for good and legal purposes. Most major cities have more than a few chop shops.

So if a car is easy to get into, and a new transponder is easy to acquire, program and install, there isn’t anything “un-stealable” about the car, is there? Apparently many insurance companies are the only ones willing to maintain the belief that it is.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm based in the Washington, D.C. area, and we are currently investigating compensation claims lawsuits against Mazda on behalf of consumers who purchased these defective vehicles. We are offering legal assistance to those who had their cars broken into or stolen, and we are also offering assistance to consumers who were not told about the lock defect when they purchased the car. If you or a loved one is a current or former owner of a Mazda 3 between the model years of 2004 to 2007, please contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

The Issue: Although the defect and its subsequent instances of personal property loss were bad enough, that is only part of the problem here. Mazda manufactured, marketed and sold a product that was not safe and secure, even as they were claiming otherwise in advertisements, marketing materials and sales pitches at auto dealerships. They continued to do this even after they knew about the defect. This resulted in people buying cars that they otherwise would not have purchased if they had all of the necessary information. Mazda left out a very important piece of information when selling the vehicle, and people who bought this car were unable to take precautions against possible negative effects because they didn’t know that this problem existed. In fact, only three categories of people knew that there was a problem with the locks: Thieves, police and Mazda executives and dealers.  This defect has resulted in class action lawsuits against Mazda.

What We Are Doing: Greenberg and Bederman is a law firm based in the Washington, D.C. area, and we are currently investigating compensation claims against Mazda on behalf of consumers who purchased these defective vehicles. We are offering legal assistance and we are filing class action lawsuits on behalf of those who had their cars broken into or stolen, and we are also offering assistance to consumers who were not told about the lock defect when they purchased the car. If you or a loved one is a current or former owner of a Mazda 3 between the model years of 2004 to 2007, please contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

The writer of the Post article compares the settlement costs in D.C. to those of Montgomery County, which pays considerably less for lawsuit costs despite having a bigger population (and, it has to be assumed, more lawyers residing there.) The easy assumption would be that somehow lawsuits are easier to file in D.C, and as a result lawyers are flocking there to sue the city.

These lawsuits are not a reflection on the lawyers, or the victims that the lawyers represent. They are a reflection on how Washington, D.C. is maintained and administered. If a sidewalk is left in a state of disrepair for months at a time, are private citizens expected to fix it themselves? They would probably be fined if they tried. If someone injures himself as the result of those not responsible fixing the sidewalk, should he be expected to pay his own medical bills?

If a patient is neglected by the staff at a facility and is severely injured as a result, should he just shrug his shoulders and move on with his life?

If a family member dies while under the care of the state and the family is not told about it (or even given a body to bury) should they just write it off as “one of those things that happens?”

If someone is injured when a public worker is careless when performing his assigned tasks, should the injury victim shoulder the costs of that injury by himself?

If a group of people have their civil liberties violated by the police and are treated in ways that go directly against the United States Constitution, should they just forget about it?

Lawsuits aren’t filed for fun. They are filed because sometimes people get hurt due to actions that were careless and unnecessary. Sometimes bad things happen to people that are the fault of someone else. And when someone is injured, a simple apology won’t be enough. An apology from the sanitation worker who hit the bicyclist with the garbage can is all well and good, but it won’t pay the medical bills that the bicyclist faced. An apology from the orderlies and nurses who ignored the advice of the doctor doesn’t help pay for the mentally ill person who is now blind. So the question is this: Are all of these lawsuits happening because there are too many lawyers in D.C.?

Greenberg and Bederman is apersonal injury law firm located in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, one mile from the Washington DC line. We offer legal assistance to people who have been injured due to car, truck and motorcycleaccidents, pedestrian and bicycle accidents, premises liability cases, cases of medical malpractice, and people who have been injured due to the use of defective pharmaceutical drugs. We can help anyone who has been injured in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has been injured due to no fault of your own,  contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free injury case legal consultation.

The wonderful thing about living in a democracy is that our court system is designed to give a fair hearing to everyone, and unfortunately that includes the assorted cranks, attention grabbers and time wasters. The law doesn’t say that only certain types of people can petition the court for redress of grievances, or certain types of cases.  The law says that we all can. We view this as a good thing. If you could outlaw certain types of lawsuits, where would you start? Lawsuits against businesses? Corporations? Individuals? Would you just do away with lawsuits altogether? It might seem like a good idea when you listen to the stories about Mr. Riches or Judge Pearson, but it will certainly not seem like one in the event that you have to use the court system.

Another thing that should be considered is that in almost all of these stupid lawsuits, you will find that only a miniscule amount of them are represented by legitimate attorneys. In the case of Mr. Riches, for example, not only does he represent himself, but his filings are all scrawled out by hand on a tablet of paper. And Judge Pearson’s suit was so outlandish that the only possible person who could have represented him was himself. There are no “greedy trial lawyers” involved in these cases, because they aren’t cases. They are jokes.

For those of you who don’t know, trial attorneys operate on a contingency basis. This means that they agree to act as the plaintiff’s legal representation not for an hourly rate, but rather for a percentage of whatever money is collected. And that means that if the plaintiff gets nothing, his or her attorneys get a percentage of nothing, which is still nothing. With that in mind, why would any attorney who bases his livelihood on winning cases take on a case that has no chance of being successful?

Personal injury attorneys don’t throw cases against the wall just to see what sticks. Attorneys who represent the injured for a living know this is a bad business model and a waste of time. Sometimes we wonder if the ultimate goal of tort reformers in not just restrictions on some lawsuits, but restrictions on all lawsuits in general. And the best way for them to do that is to paint with the broadest brush possible, and to focus on the handful of actual frivolous cases as if they were the rule and not the exception.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and we offer legal assistance to injury victims all over Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. We help those who have been seriously injured due to car accidents, medical malpractice and dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. If you or a loved one has been injured, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

The arbitrator’s ruling means that Mr. Biller can offer proof to his claims that Toyota asked him to hide evidence regarding the many faults of Toyota vehicles, such as accelerator pedals that stuck, brakes that didn’t work, and steering that failed. The reason that this is important is because Mr. Biller’s contention shifts the premise from negligence to criminal negligence. It’s one thing if there were defects in Toyotas and the people at Toyota were unaware of them. But it is a different matter entirely if Toyota knew about these defects and actively tried to suppress other people finding out about them.

These defects weren’t minor in nature. It wasn’t a faulty radio knob or a glove compartment latch. Toyota’s defects put the lives of drivers, passengers and anyone in the vicinity of these malfunctions in serious danger. Thousands of Toyotas had defective floor mats that made the accelerator stick to the floor. Thousands more had accelerator pedals which stuck to the floor regardless of the floor mat. Thousands more had steering that momentarily gave out. These would all be bad enough if Toyota simply didn’t know. But Mr. Biller is claiming that they did know, and chose to cover these defects up rather than act to fix them, all while Toyota drivers were losing control of their cars. Again, this goes beyond negligence and into criminal behavior, and it is a positive development that Toyota will not be able to hide behind any corporate privilege or trade secrecy laws.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm based in the Washington, D.C. area. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured incar accidents caused by faulty and malfunctioning Toyota vehicles. If you or a loved one has been injured due to a Toyota crash, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

Morally speaking, there are many things wrong with this concept. And there are more than a few examples as to how these caps exist for no other reason than the financial convenience of the insurance companies.

One example in particular is happening in Nevada right now. A doctor named Depak Disal runs an endoscopy clinic there, and it is alleged that his clinic caused a hepatitis outbreak which affected thousands of people all over Nevada. At issue is this question: Does the damage cap cover “people,” or “incidents?”

In other words, if it can be proven that Dr. Disal was responsible for “one” hepatitis outbreak, would this mean that his insurance company would be obliged to pay out the limit of the $350,000 damage cap only once? Would everyone who allegedly got hepatitis from Dr. Disal’s clinic be forced to share one capped judgment? Or would the cap apply to each individual person who contracted hepatitis? Would any of you like to take a guess as to which side of the argument Dr. Disal’s insurance company is on?

As strange as this argument seems, one court in Nevada actually agreed with the premise, but another judge ruled the exact opposite. So we expect the case to be ruled upon by the Nevada Supreme Court fairly soon. And if rulings in other states are any indication, it could be that damage caps in Nevada might be a thing of the past altogether.

Illinois and Georgia are two states where their respective Supreme Courts have ruled that caps on damages are unconstitutional, based on the grounds that they ignore the separation of powers that was written into the Constitution. In other words, damage caps lessen the ability of a judge or jury to rule effectively on a case. With damage caps, a judgment on a supposedly independent court case is essentially pre-determined by members of another branch, and that is absolutely against the premises laid out in Articles I, II and III.

While we most certainly agree with that on legal grounds, we also find it outrageous that state or federal legislators are allowed to assign market value to pain, suffering and emotional loss. We also can’t imagine that a hepatitis victim being eligible only for a “share” of a judgment rather than a separate judgment is in any way fair. Hopefully, the Nevada Supreme Court will do away with damage caps entirely, and the question of whether it was “one” incident or a few thousands separate incidents will be rendered moot.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. who have been injured due to medical negligence, misdiagnosis, violation of standard of care, or surgical errors. If you or a loved one has been hurt due to a doctor’s mistake, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free medical malpractice legal consultation today.

These incidents led to studies by Swissmedic, which is the Swiss equivalent of the FDA, and by the British Medical Journal. Both of these studies concluded that women who use oral contraceptives with drospirenone experience a higher rate of blood clots than women who use other forms of hormone based oral contraceptives. Since Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella are the only pills that actually use drospirenone, it went without saying that the study was about these three birth control pills.  In its public relations defense, Bayer simply appropriated a line in both studies in which it was implied that the clotting side effects were “similar to those in other birth control pills,” but they neglected to mention that both the studies said that the risks were not only similar, but significantly higher as well.

As of last July (which was about the time that these birth control pills started to come under scrutiny,) the number of women worldwide who died as the result of complications from clotting (strokes, heart attacks or pulmonary embolisms) stood at around fifty. There have also been thousands of cases of non-fatal pulmonary embolisms, strokes and heart attacks, as well as some cases of gall bladder disease. Bayer hasn’t been forthcoming with the numbers  regarding deaths or injuries, but since they have not stopped marketing or selling these drugs, we have to assume that the numbers have only gone up.

As a result of all of these injuries and deaths, Bayer is facing an increasing number of lawsuits.  So far, there have been approximately 1,100 separate instances of litigation against Bayer over injuries and deaths that have occurred among users of Yaz and Yasmin.  All of the cases that have been filed in Federal court have been consolidated under multi district litigation so that there is consistency in pretrial discovery. To learn about Yaz lawsuits, read our article called “Understanding Yaz Class Action Lawsuits”.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been addressing these concerns at its usual pace, which is maddeningly slow. The closest they have come to even sanctioning Bayer was to force them to re-do their controversial marketing campaign because they believed it to be both misleading and contrary to the FDA approved labeling that Yaz and Yasmin have as part of their packaging. While you can certainly make the argument that the FDA’s actions here were important, they are inadequate  when you think of the things that could be done.

And that’s one of the more frustrating elements of this whole scenario. A pharmaceutical company puts out a product that carries a significantly higher risk of use than any of the similar products on the market, but the pharmaceutical company fails to mention this higher risk in any of its advertising, marketing or labeling. This leads to injuries and deaths due to consumers not being properly informed. And after years of delays the FDA decides to simply allow Bayer to put the following “new label” on Yaz and Yasmin:

WASHINGTON - Bayer HealthCare said Friday it has added new information about the risks of blood clots to its contraceptive pills Yaz and Yasmin. In cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration, the company said it added new labeling stating that the risks of blood clots with Yaz and Yasmin are similar to those with other oral contraceptives. The statements are based on two large, multiyear studies of more than 120,000 women taking contraceptives in the U.S. and the U.K.

What this means is that Bayer is simply saying that Yaz and Yasmin are risky, but so is every other birth control pill on the market. This is incredibly disingenuous. What should be on the label is the truth, which is that Yaz and Yasmin are significantly more dangerous than any other form of oral contraceptive.

We fail to understand why the FDA would crack down on Bayer for misleading advertising but not do so on misleading labeling. If two major studies claim that Yaz and Yasmin are more dangerous, then why would the FDA allow Bayer to claim that the pills are no different?

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering legal help to women in the Washington, D.C. area who have been injured and hospitalized due to complications from Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella. Since the Food and Drug Administration is hesitant to take substantive action, it is up to the victims to take action. By taking your injury case to court, you could not only receive compensation for your injuries and medical bills, but you could also let Bayer know that there are consequences to selling and marketing dangerous products. You could tell them that there are actual people being affected by their decisions, and that there is more to running a business than the balance sheet at the end of the fiscal quarter.

Greenberg and Bederman has been helping injury victims in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. for twenty five years, and that includes people who have been injured by faulty or dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. If you or a loved one has been injured from taking Yaz or Yasmin,contact our yaz lawyer, Andy Bederman, for a free yaz legal consultation today.

The FDA is currently investigating these pills, which unfortunately is a process that can take months. In the meantime, there have been a slew of lawsuits filed against Bayer all over the United States, so much so to the point that many of them have been consolidated under what is called “multi-district litigation.” To understand multi-district litigation please read our article on Understanding Yaz Class Action Lawsuits. This is when tort cases that are similar in nature are essentially placed under the same ground rules in terms of evidence and witness testimony.

The premise of many of the yaz lawsuits is that not only did Bayer release and aggressively market a drug that is hazardous to women who use it, but that they did so while knowing that the use of dropserinone made it more dangerous than other birth control pills on the market. Many lawsuits are also alleging that Bayer used misleading marketing to increase sales, implying in their advertisements that Yaz could clear up all forms of acne or help women get past the negative emotional experiences of PMS.

And it isn’t just in the United States that these lawsuits are taking place. Our neighbors to the north are experiencing the same problems with Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella. There were 2 million prescriptions of Yaz and Yasmin in Canada in 2009.

In an article on CTV Edmonton, some women who have been taking these birth control pills are experiencing similar if not identical problems. One woman from Nova Scotia experienced a racing heart beat and dizziness after only taking Yaz for a short period of time. After being told by her doctors that she was essentially fine, she suffered what is called a transient ischemic attack, or a “mini stroke.” It left her paralyzed on the left side of her body and she was unable to communicate with anyone for an extended period of time.

Another woman from Halifax switched from Yasmin to Yaz due to some initial discomfort, but after 18 months on the pill she began to experience severe abdominal pains. Upon being examined by doctors, they determined that she had severe gallstones and that her gall bladder would have to be removed. The use of Yaz and gall bladder problems are not unrelated either.

 Bayer is steadfastly denying that they acted inappropriately or even that there is anything wrong with its Yaz birth control pills:

Bayer contends its oral contraceptives "have been and continue to be extensively studied worldwide and are safe and effective when used according to the product labeling."

"Bayer reaffirms and stands behind the safety of its drospirenone-containing oral contraceptives," the company said in a response to CTV News.

As for the lawsuits, Bayer said it is "in the process of gathering information on these cases, but the complaints we have reviewed so far pertain to side effects that are warned about in the labeling of all oral contraceptives, including ours. Bayer will defend itself vigorously against these lawsuits."

The judicial process in Canada is somewhat different from ours, but what we do have in common is that the Canadian courts recognize the rights of citizens to seek damages from those who are responsible for their injuries. We believe that Bayer released and aggressively marketed a pill that is dangerous to women, and that they did so with the knowledge of the risks. As a result of this, women who have been injured or hospitalized due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella are entitled to compensation for their medical bills, pain and suffering and lost income.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. based injury law firm, and we are currently offering legal assistance to women who have been injured due to the use of Bayer’s line of birth control pills. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. has been hospitalized due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

Avandia works by making the cells more sensitive and responsive to insulin, which reduces the body’s need for the stringent blood sugar monitoring that diabetic patients require. If it works like it is supposed to, it allows diabetes patients to live their lives without going through the constant testing and monitoring that takes up so much of their time. But you have to think that if people had to choose between less blood testing and a massive heart attack, they would be willing to accept the inconvenience of the testing.

As important as the FDA’s actions are, they didn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone. A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine had already suggested that users of Avandia had an increased risk (by as much as 43%) of heart failure as opposed to diabetics who were treating their condition with regular insulin. And the FDA has further issued a so-called “black box warning label” for the medication, which is a way for the FDA to let the general public know that there are some real concerns about the medication that patients are about to take.

GlaxoSmithKline, who designed, manufacture and market the drug, went into full damage control mode, which meant an onslaught of press releases, as well as “rejecting the conclusions” of the New England Journal of Medicine, the FDA, and anyone with any teeth who had anything negative to say about their type 2 diabetes drug. To give you an idea of GSK’s overall game plan (as well as give you an idea as to how nervous this drug was making people, all you have to do is look at the titles of the numerous press releases that they put out in the wake of all of these negative studies:

o    24 Feb 2010: GlaxoSmithKline responds to US Senate Committee on Finance report on Avandia

o    20 Feb 2010 - GSK rejects conclusions of Senate Committee on Finance Staff Report on Avandia

o    20 Feb 2010 - GSK rejects conclusions reported in The New York Times story on Avandia

o    6 February 2008 - GlaxoSmithKline responds to findings in ACCORD study

o    3 December 2007 - GSK response to Nature Medicine article on rosiglitazone and bone in mice

o    11 September 2007 - GlaxoSmithKline responds to JAMA articles

o    27 July 2007 - GlaxoSmithKline statement in diabetes care study thiazolidinediones and heart failure: a teleo-analysis

o    5 June 2007 - GSK response to New England Journal of Medicine editorials

o    21 May 2007 - GSK response to NEJM article

o    21 May 2007 - GSK response to US Senate Committee on Finance

In case you aren’t keeping count, that’s ten solid denials of studies and warnings by the official digest of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and the Senate Finance Committee.

One thing that GSK seems particularly adept at is refuting any studies that portray Avandia in a negative light and creating a more positive outlook on the side effects of Avandia. As personal injury attorneys who represent product liability injuries, this is certainly something familiar with. Quite often, when we present one expert witness, the attorneys for the defendant will provide two or three expert witnesses claiming the opposite.

Over two hundred studies were sent to the FDA by GSK. These all contradicted any negative reports of Avandia, whether it was articles in medical journals, independent studies, or even editorials in newspapers. Rather than just accept that both the NEJM and the FDA had been buried in an avalanche of contradictory news, the British Medical Journal not only took a look at the data in these positive studies, but also at who was responsible for writing and researching them.

What the BMJ found out was that of these, a full 45% of these studies were done by people who had authors with serious financial conflicts of interest. This means that they were essentially on the payroll of either GSK or other competing pharmaceutical companies, either through research grants or consulting fees. There was more:

“Moreover, in an era of “seemingly ubiquitous” requirements for disclosure of financial interests in medical journals, only 53% of the articles reviewed included a competing interest statement, noted the authors from the Mayo Clinical in Rochester, US.”

“…Of these 90 articles, only 69 (77%) included a statement disclosing the conflict of interest in the article itself, while three of the 21 articles that did not disclose the relationship published a statement declaring no conflicts of interest.”

This is hardly unbiased research. If your next grant or paycheck depends on positive reviews, what are the odds that your reports will be, if not skewed in favor, at least carefully neutral?

This isn’t the first time such conflicts have been brought to light. In the wake of the Vioxx scandal, the New York Times discovered that the FDA’s independent advisory committee (which essentially makes or breaks controversial drugs) was populated with scientists and researchers who had similar conflicts of interest. This is profoundly interesting to us, especially if you take a look at the following press release from GSK:

July 30, 2007 — Philadelphia, PA

GlaxoSmithKline [NYSE: GSK] today welcomed the nearly unanimous recommendation of a US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory committee to support Avandia’s (rosiglitazone maleate) continued availability to patients in the US. The company said it will continue to provide information to the FDA to assist in the Agency’s final decision-making.

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering free legal consultations to people in the Washington, D.C. area who have been injured and/or hospitalized due to heart complications from taking Avandia.  For a free legal review of your Avandia bad drug injury, please fill out a free legal Avandia form, or call Andrew Bederman at (301) 589-2200 for a free legal consultation.

As a result of these injuries and deaths, over 1100 lawsuits have been filed nationwide, with many of them falling under Multi District Litigation, which is a way to place cases with similar backgrounds against the same defendant under the same ground rules. A few class action suits (in which one group of attorneys represents multiple plaintiffs under the heading of one case) have also been filed.

Bayer has, of course, vowed to fight any and all yaz lawsuits regarding their line of birth control pills, and we certainly believe them. With profits of Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella reaching $1.7 billion dollars in 2009, Bayer can afford to wage as many court battles as they see fit. Even with all the justified bad publicity, Yaz is still Bayer’s top selling product.

The Bayer Corporation has already given some clues as to what they expect their defense to be. They recently made an attempt to allow past birth control history of the plaintiff’s to be used as evidence, which was quite rightly denied. And based on public statements by Bayer, we are expecting them to center their defenses on the warning label that is currently in place on the products themselves.

Bayer will probably wear the current label as a shield against any liability, with the premise being “Look, we have a warning label on the box, and the doctors who prescribe it have their warnings as well. If you didn’t read it, we can hardly be expected to be blamed for that.”

There are a few things wrong with that premise. In the first place, the warnings weren’t mentioned very prominently in the enormous and splashy advertising campaign that Bayer used for Yaz. The focus on these ads was all about what Yaz could do for you besides keep you from getting pregnant. In the second place, while the warning on the doctor’s labels does admit that there is a risk of hyperlykemia (elevated potassium levels,) it fails to mention that drispirenone has a higher risk of causing hyperlykemia than any other progestin based oral contraceptive on the market. Since hyperlykemia is a possibility with most other pills, this warning label basically makes it seem as if Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella are no different than any other pill on the market when it comes to risk, and this is simply not true.

An equivalent here would be if a gun manufacturer was selling a pistol that has a higher tendency to fire accidentally than any other gun on the market, but since there is a slight chance that many guns on the market will fire accidentally, their particular gun is no different than the others.

When you study the injuries associated with yaz Bayer’s warning labels should produce a list of conditions that should discourage you from taking any of their drispirenone based pills:

Yaz should not be used in women who have the following:

·         Renal insufficiency

·         Hepatic dysfunction

·         Adrenal Insufficiency

·         Thrombophlebitis or thromboembolic disorders

·         A past history of deep-vein thrombophlebitis or thromboembolic disorders

·         Cerebral-vascular or coronary-artery disease (current or history)

·         Valvular heart disease with thrombogenic complications

·         Severe hypertension

·         Diabetes with vascular involvement

·         Headaches with focal neurological symptoms

·         Major surgery with prolonged immobilization

·         Known or suspected carcinoma of the breast

·         Carcinoma of the endometrium or other known or suspected estrogen-dependent neoplasia

·         Undiagnosed abnormal genital bleeding

·         Cholestatic jaundice of pregnancy or jaundice with prior Pill use

·         Known or suspected pregnancy

·         Liver tumor (benign or malignant) or active liver disease

·         Heavy smoking (≥ 15 cigarettes per day) and over age 35

·         Hypersensitivity to any component of this product

This is all well and good, but that doesn’t explain the hundreds of women who are suffering from none of these symptoms who are still being injured and hospitalized. And aside from that obvious red flag, these symptoms all more or less appear as disqualifications on the warnings for practically every other birth control pill out there. This again makes it appear that Bayer’s line of birth control pills are just the same as every other oral contraceptive, when they are in fact not, and that is one of the major reasons for all of these yaz lawsuits.

The “read the warning label” argument doesn’t carry any water unless that warning label clearly states that drispirenone increases your chances of hyperlykemia, which increase your chances of DVT, which increases your chances of heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms and gall bladder disease. The increased chances aren’t mentioned in a clear manner at all. Bayer did not say “Here is a birth control pill that can prevent acne and the symptoms of PMDD, but it increases the odds that you will suffer from blood clots. Take it at your own risk.” They simply said “Here is a standard, run of the mill birth control pill, except it can prevent acne and the symptoms of PMDD!”

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering legal assistance for people in the Washington D.C. area who have been injured due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella. Our attorneys are working diligently to help women in Virginia, Maryland and the District who have been hospitalized due to Bayer’s line of birth control pills. If you or a loved one has been injured in this manner, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free yaz legal consultation today.

To learn more about yaz birth control, please read our yaz lawyers website page, or watch our yaz video on Youtube.

As predicted, Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella became Bayer’s top selling products. And this is exactly why the casualty rate is so high. It turns out that drospirenone does other things besides acne and PMDD prevention. It also dramatically raises the potassium levels in the bloodstreams of the women who use it. This condition (called hyperkalimia) does not lead to positive health benefits. High potassium levels in the bloodstream can and do lead to blood clots in the arteries or veins in the legs, which is called deep vein thrombosis. These clots then break apart and the pieces start to travel through the bloodstream, where they then block the regular flow of blood. This leads to pulmonary embolisms, strokes and heart attacks. This is not to mention gall bladder disease, which has also been linked to Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella.

As of right now, Bayer’s public defense has been presented in two ways. The first is to say that since they have a warning label on the box, and since they mentioned the possible side effects on both the warning labels and the commercials, then it couldn’t possibly be their fault if nobody read it. The second public defense is to release statements that say things like, “When taken properly, Yaz or Yasmin are effective and safe birth control pills,” which implies that it is somehow the fault of the person who was taking the drug rather than the drug manufacturers themselves.

We find a great deal wrong with both of these methods of defense. In the first place, considering that the only way you can get birth control pills in this country is through a prescription from a doctor, most patients are already assuming that the pills are safe. If your doctor prescribes you a medication, wouldn’t you assume without thinking about it that it won’t be harmful to your health? With that being the case, we have to make the assumption that Bayer did not tell the medical community everything that it needed to know.

Secondly, how can you possibly blame the patient for any illnesses or adverse medical conditions that develop? Birth control pills are relatively easy to deal with. It’s one pill a day. We find it hard to believe that any of the women who have been taking these pills have somehow stumbled across a magic formula to make an otherwise benign working birth control pill deadly.

If Bayer had come right out and said “This pill contains an ingredient that increases the likelihood of deep vein thrombosis, strokes, heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms and gall bladder disease,” then it could be said that their bases were covered. But they did not. They did not say such things on the labeling, they did not say such things in their multi-million dollar advertising campaign, and they certainly aren’t admitting it now that the casualty numbers are starting to come in.

The women filing the yaz lawsuit in Indianapolis are only a fraction of the number of women all over the world who have suffered real and provable damage from the use of these birth control pills. Women who, in good faith, took birth control pills that were dangerous to their health, and these women were hospitalized with painful or even fatal injuries.

Here in the Washington, D.C. area, Greenberg and Bederman has been leading the way in both informing women of the dangers of Bayer’s line of birth control pills and providing legal assistance for women who have been harmed by using these pills. We are currently representing several women who have been injured and hospitalized due to Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella.

If you or a loved one has been similarly injured, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free yaz legal consultation today.

To learn more about our yaz lawyer, Andy Bederman, please read about Andy Bederman, or watch his yaz video onYoutube.

Bayer’s birth control pills, which are marketed under the names of Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella, contain an ingredient called drospirenone, which is a synthetic variation of progestin. Bayer claims that this ingredient brings with it additional benefits, such as an easier time with premenstrual dysphoric disorder as well as a cure for acne. The trade off is that the levels of potassium in the blood go up, which can and has shown to cause blood clots. These  blood clots can break apart and travel, which causes blockages in the heart (cardiac arrests,) blockages in the brain (strokes,) and blockages in the lungs (pulmonary embolisms.)

The British Medical Journal recently released a study claiming that out of all the commercially available hormonal replacement birth control pills, women that take the brands that contain drospirenone have a 6.3 % greater chance of suffering from blood clotting. Concrete evidence of this study is currently manifesting itself among women all over the country, as more and more otherwise healthy women who use Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella are being hospitalized with pulmonary embolisms, heart attacks and strokes.

Since so many women are filing suit under similar circumstances, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ruled that suits involving Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella should be consolidated for pretrial discovery. What this means is that rather than have each individual victim of these birth control pills file an individual law suit, which would require them to provide what is essentially the same sort of evidence over and over again, and call the same witnesses over and over again, our court system has decided to determine what will be considered standard evidence so this won’t have to be determined again and again.

So far, the multi-district litigation has progressed somewhat smoothly, and Bayer has provided a million pages of documents as part of the discovery process. There has also been some give and take regarding how confidential information will be handled during the trial. This actually should work in both the favor of Bayer and the plaintiffs. Bayer does not want any trade secret information to be made available, and the plaintiffs don’t want any private information regarding sexual history or birth control history to be part of the evidence. It appears that both sides should be satisfied in that regard.

What is important about this consolidation of cases is that a great deal of time and necessity has been removed from the trial process. With so much of the evidence and testimony already established, women will be able to present their cases that much faster. In fact, there is already discussion between Bayer and some defendant’s attorneys about what are called “bellwether trials,” in which some cases will be selected early in order to determine how these trials can be expected to proceed with the established evidence.

We would hope that this state of affairs would remove some of the barriers that prevent otherwise victimized women from stepping forward and pursuing a case. There have been a few occasions where otherwise healthy women who have been injured and hospitalized due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella have gotten in touch with us, but then they talked themselves out of taking any action whatsoever. They were afraid that the whole process would take too long, or they somehow convinced themselves that the blame fell squarely on them, or they were convinced that a trial would bring out embarrassing personal information.

This is precisely the wrong attitude to take. Bayer has released a birth control pill that is not only more harmful to women than any other similar product, but they also overstated the peripheral benefits of the pill, which persuaded more and more women to buy it, without being fully aware of the increased risks from the drospirenone in the birth control pill .

We can’t expect that going through the judicial process will be easy, because it almost never is. But we can tell you that, thanks to this multi-district litigation consolidation, quite a few of the more tedious obstacles have been removed.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm that offers legal assistance for injury victims in the Washington, D.C. area. We have helped thousands of Washingtonians receive fair compensation for car accidents, medical malpractice and Social Security disability. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella, contact our yaz lawyer, Andrew Bederman, from Greenberg & Bederman for a free yaz legal consultation, or watch his yaz lawyer video on youtube.

We completely understand how some people might find such advertising a little disconcerting, but we would like to point out that anyone who has any sort of business engages in advertising, be it a law firm or hardware store or ice cream parlor. Business owners who do not advertise will probably not be business owners for very long. And having represented the injured in the D.C. area for so long, we can tell you with great certainty that injury victims who choose to go it alone usually get treated very poorly by insurers or business owners. Our advertising is not just a way of getting business; it is letting the injured know that they have options and legal rights that they might be unaware of.

Word of Mouth and Professional References: The next time you are at a dinner party, ask any of the guests if they have been involved in a serious car accident. There will probably be more than one person who says yes. You may further ask if any of the guests had difficulties with their insurance company, and we can bet that more than one person will say yes. It is usually the bad behavior of the insurance company that causes the inured to look for an injury or accident lawyer. We have provided legal services for injury victims in the D.C. area for a little less than twenty five years now, and in that time we have built a good reputation as ethical, AV Martindale rated, knowledgeable injury lawyers. Quite often we get calls or e-mails from people who have been hurt, and they say that they were referred by a cousin or a co-worker that we have represented, or by other attorneys who don’t practice injury law.

Our Website: The internet is a crucial element of any modern marketing strategy, and we do our best to keep up with the rapidly changing pace of technological advancements. To that end, we update our website and our blog with new information constantly, not only to attract potential clients but also to keep the average citizen informed on legal issues and changes in the law that might affect them.

Other Internet Marketing: We engage in PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaigns on Google,Yahoo and Facebook, in which those who type in specific key words will be shown a prominently placed link to our website at the top of the results.

So in a nutshell, we use all of the above mentioned methods to market our services. What follows is a list of what we don’t do.

WHAT WE DON’T DO:

Unsolicited Approaches: We do not and have never contacted injury victims without being contacted first.  We find that unsolicited approach to be profoundly unethical, in bad taste, and, in many cases such methods are against the law. In fact, we wrote a strongly worded article expressing that very same sentiment on this blog a week ago.

Visiting the Scene of an Accident:  An accident scene is usually chaotic, whether it is a major accident or a minor crash. The last thing the police or paramedics need is people  getting in the way, whether they are onlookers, insurance adjusters, or personal injury attorneys. We have never visited the immediate aftermath of an accident for the purposes of “drumming up business.” Frankly, we find such behavior repulsive.

Guarantees: We have never offered guarantees of a successful verdict or settlement to our clients, and we believe that anyone who is approached by attorneys who make such guarantees should find other legal counsel immediately. We also don’t encourage people to take legal action where there is barely any basis for doing so. Quite often, we end up telling people who come to see us that the settlement that they were offered was a fair one and that the matter should end there. We NEVER talk people into filing lawsuits.

Any lawsuit is a serious matter, and is not something to be taken lightly. We make sure that all of our potential clients know the pros and cons of taking their case to court, and we make sure that they know what to expect when they initiate legal action.

If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident in the D.C. area due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free consultation today.

The problem is that with health care, there is no such thing as a “Usual and Customary” rate. Big insurance companies are able to negotiate lower costs for services because of the volume of care seekers that they bring to hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices. Once you go out of network, you no longer have the weight of your insurance company’s negotiating skill behind you. So the costs for your treatment vary wildly from place to place. A sprained ankle in Tacoma, Washington might cost much more than the same injury in Yuma, Arizona. It depends on who owns the hospital, whether the facility is independent or whether an HMO runs the facility, or what their billing policies are. Health care is quite literally wide open. There is no “invisible hand of Adam Smith” keeping the price of services up or down.

So for the sake of argument, let’s say you are on vacation in rural Vermont and you break your leg. The non-negotiated, out-of-network costs might be a lot higher than the costs of the same injury at the hospital you would go to in Bethesda, Maryland, Arlington, Virginia or Washington, D.C. So if you paid extra on your policy every month for out of network costs, you would probably assume that your insurance policy would pick up 80% of whatever the hospital in Vermont is charging you. But instead, your insurance policy is picking up 80% of what Ingenix decides is “Usual and Customary.”

And that’s exactly what the problem was. Attorney General Cuomo discovered that Ingenix was skewing its “Usual and Customary” rates so that everything was reported as much cheaper than it was in real life, which lowered the amount that insurance companies were obligated to cover. So if the guy with the broken leg in Vermont is presented with an out of network bill for $4000, the insurance company can say “According to our calculations, the Usual and Customary rate for your injury is $2500, of which we will pay $2000.” This leaves you on the hook for $2000, as well as all the extra money you had been paying each month for the out of network coverage, which was evidently completely useless due to Ingenix.

It wasn’t only the policyholders who were getting stuck with huge medical bills. Most people don’t have the amount of cash on hand that it takes to pay for enormous medical expenses (this is why they had insurance, after all,) so the providers end up selling their debt to bill collectors for nickels on the dollar just so they can recoup some of their losses. So both the policy holder and the healthcare provider lose out, but guess who doesn’t? The insurance companies that use Ingenix software for their out of market billing. Which is to say almost all of them.

All of this is bad enough, but what makes the whole scenario even worse is that Ingenix was actually a wholly owned subsidiary of United Health Care, one of the biggest health care insurance providers in the United States. This is like a professional football team being allowed to bring its own referees to the Super Bowl. Who do you think is going to win out?

We would like to say that this case of price fixing was an isolated incident, but we can’t for two reasons. The first reason is that this rigged software was used by practically the entire American health insurance industry. How “isolated” could something be if the entire system is using the same flawed data? The second reason is that this is not the first episode of big insurance using skewed data in their software to maximize profits at the expense of their policyholders. Auto insurance companies are still to this day using a program called “Colossus,” which uses skewed data to “average out” the costs of physical injuries. Just like Ingenix, Colossus also leaves policyholders on the hook for thousands of dollars worth of medical costs that should have been paid by the insurer in the first place.

While it’s a good thing that Ingenix was essentially forced out of business by Mr. Cuomo, and it is good that users of Colossus are facing similar investigations, these changes have come a little too late for the hundreds of thousands of patients and medical professionals who have been ripped off as a result of these skewed computer programs. We think that the country would be better served if the states or federal government were more proactive about examining healthcare billing software. It’s good that we have firemen, but we have more of a need for Smokey the Bear.

The data that these companies use to determine pricing should be open to review, not kept as a trade secret. Nor should any companies that develop similar software have any financial ties to insurance companies. The fact that Ingenix was owned by one of the biggest health care companies in America is a massive conflict of interest, and one that cost Americans millions of dollars.

Greenberg & Bederman is a personal injury law firm located one half block from the SIlver Spring metro station.  We have been handling personal injury law since 1985.  To learn more about our personal injury lawyers, please read about Andrew Bederman, Roger Greenberg, or Jason Fernandez, or watch some of our personal injury videos on Youtube.

But every so often, even staunch advocates of tort reform find themselves in instances where they need the aid of the courts, and that makes them rethink their whole outlook, especially when they discover that the tort restrictions that they supported have prevented them from receiving fair compensation for their damages. Former senator Trent Lott (R-MS) serves as a perfect example of this.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people in Louisiana and Mississippi found themselves with their homes ruined by the devastation of a category three storm. Katrina lasted almost a week, and at its peak the wind speed was moving at 175 miles an hour. The preliminary damage estimates in terms of property was $100 billion.

Among those who found themselves with lost property was Senator Lott. He owned a beach house in Mississippi that was deemed a total loss as a result of the hurricane. Like thousands of people all over the Gulf Coast, he filed a damage claim with State Farm. And, like thousands of people all over the Gulf Coast, he had his claim promptly and utterly rejected by State Farm.

It’s important to note that prior to this rejection, Senator Lott was one of the biggest advocates of tort reform in the Senate. Here are just a few of his quotes and press releases on the subject.

"The Democrats seem to think that the answer is a lawsuit. Sue everybody."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 7/20/01

"I'm among many Mississippi citizens who believe tort reform is needed."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 5/8/02

"You know, obviously we should [enact tort reform]...Someday it will happen, and the sooner the better."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 1/24/01

"Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi today credited the agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and tort reform initiatives passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Bush with the overall upturn in the national economy."
- Sen. Trent Lott press release, 12/2/05

"If their answer to everything is more lawsuits, then yes, that's a problem, because I certainly don't support that."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 8/2/02

"It's sue, sue, sue... That's not the answer."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 8/4/01

But once Senator Lott got a taste of how the very industry that he backed through speeches, votes on the Senate floor and legislation actually operates, he didn’t much like it. So he filed a lawsuit against State Farm, in which he hoped to force the insurance company to pay for his damages.

A more recent and even more high profile defection from the tort reform movement occurred on June 6, 2006, when Judge Robert Bork fell and injured himself while getting ready to deliver a speech at the Yale Club in New York City. According to the Wall Street Journal:

“Bork was at the Yale Club last June to speak at an event sponsored by The New Criterion, a monthly review of the arts and intellectual life. According to the suit filed in federal court in Manhattan, the club failed to provide steps and a handrail to climb onto the dais. Bork fell backward as he was attempting to climb the dais, striking his leg on the stage and his head on a heat register, the suit says.”

The physical damages involved a massive bruise to his leg that, according to the complaint, required surgery and months of physical therapy to heal properly. Judge Bork believed that the Yale Club was negligent in that it didn’t provide a suitable railing or staircase on the way up to the speaking dais, thus directly contributing to his injuries.

Prior to his accident, Judge Bork was very much for tort reform. In fact, one of his more famous quotes on the subject compared the United States civil justice system to piracy on the high seas:

“Courts are now meccas for every conceivable unanswered grievance or perceived injury. Juries dispense lottery-like windfalls, attracting and rewarding imaginative claims and far-fetched legal theories. Today's merchant enters the marketplace with trepidation - anticipating from the civil justice system the treatment that his ancestors experienced with the Barbary pirates.”

This quote was from 1995, but it basically encapsulates Judge Bork’s entire judicial career. He held the tort system in very low regard, and actually lost his chance to be a Supreme Court Justice in part due to his extreme views on tort law and punitive damages. Yet there he was in 2006, filing not only a lawsuit to cover his damages but also seeking punitive damages in his complaint.

In the space of three years, two major proponents of tort reform have learned a very valuable lesson, which is that perhaps our tort system isn’t nearly as “broken” as it seems to be. The initial reaction would be to call Senator Lott and Judge Bork hypocrites, but we actually view it as an example of how ideology doesn’t always line up perfectly with reality. They believed something, and real life proved their beliefs wrong. They believed that our court system was broken right up until the point where they discovered that they would need it.

To learn more about personal injury in Maryland, please read our maryland personal injury page.  To learn more about our personal injury lawyers, please read about Jason Fernandez, Andrew Bederman, or Roger Greenberg, or view our personal injury videos on Youtube.

insurance companies are corporate entities and thus seek to maximize profits. Increasing premiums will effectuate this goal. The negative publicity this generates can be safely passed on as the work of legal boogeymen

1.       

insurance companies need to compensate for poor corporate investment strategies (sub-prime markets, dot-coms, Enron, etc.)

Either way, doctors should not look to plaintiffs’ lawyers as the cause of premium increases. Instead, the AMA should require insurance providers to explain the need for premium increases based on actual statistics rather than rhetoric. And, voters should ask politicians to find real problems on which to base campaigns.

Citations:

Prof. Herb Kritzer's article is Risks, Reputations, and Rewards: Contingency Fee Legal Practice in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Suggested Reading:

David A. Hyman and Charles Silver, Medical Malpractice Litigation and Tort Reform: It's the Incentives, Stupid, 59 Vand. L. Rev. 1085 (May 2006).

Jason Fernandez

For more information on medical malpractice issues, please see our website at G&B Website, and click on the medical malpractice tab.