What would you do if you ran a business that regularly had trials with millions of dollars potentially at stake and you needed to hire a lawyer to try those cases for you? How would you go about selecting that lawyer. I can pretty much guarantee that you wouldn’t choose based on seeing someone’s picture on a highway billboard or on the side of a bus.
This is the problem faced by medical malpractice insurance companies. They insure lots of doctors. They promise to defend those doctors, if they get sued, and to pay any judgments against them up to the amount of the policy limits. Those limits are usually at least $1,000,000. A single trial may involve a number of doctors they insure, which means that many millions of their dollars may be at risk in any given trial.
Hospitals face the same sort of problem. They employ nurses, staff and often doctors too. When those employees get sued, the hospital has to hire lawyers to defend them. The amounts at stake in litigation against hospital employees are not limited by a low insurance policy limit. Large hospitals are usually self-insured for the first $5,000,000 or so and then have actual insurance up to $100,000,000. Lots of money at stake in trials involving hospitals.
The attorneys who get hired to defend these malpractice cases are all cut from the same cloth. They are smart and experienced. Every one of them who tries the cases for these defendants has years of experience as a junior lawyer in a medical malpractice defense firm. The ones who didn’t have enough talent or ability were weeded out in the early years. As a junior lawyer, they participated in depositions and discovery. They learned the intricacies of medical malpractice cases. They learned what defenses to assert. They learned how to hire expert witnesses and to prepare them to testify. They learned what motions to file and how to be successful in getting the patient’s case tossed out of court. They attended trial with more senior lawyers in the firm and learned first-hand what to do at trial and how to structure a case for presentation to a jury. By the time the insurance company or hospital agrees to let them try cases on their own, they are seasoned veterans who have demonstrated their abilities as trial lawyers.
These are the people you will see across the courtroom, if you have a medical malpractice case that goes to trial. These are the people your malpractice lawyer will have to contend with at trial and for the two years leading up to the trial. How will your attorney stack up against these high-quality lawyers who specialize in medical malpractice?
Doctors and hospitals win 85-90% of the malpractice cases that go to trial and many of those cases are tried by very competent trial lawyers on behalf of the patient. It is not impossible for an inexperienced malpractice lawyer to win a case against these high-powered defense attorneys, but it takes a lot of luck and a very strong case. The much more likely outcome is that competent defense lawyers will kick an inexperienced trial lawyer around the courtroom while his or her client watches in dismay.
The hospitals and malpractice insurance companies are going to make sure they are represented by competent, experienced trial lawyers. If you have a malpractice case you want to win, you had better do the same thing.
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