There is a great article in today’s New York Times titled "Simple Checklist Makes Surgery Safer." An excerpt: "a year after surgical teams at eight hospitals adopted a 19-item checklist, the average patient death rate fell more than 40 percent and the rate of complications fell by about a third, the researchers…
The January 2009 edition of the Tennessee Bar Journal includes my quarterly column on tort law. This column is titled "NIED Claims after Flax and Eskin." For some reason, the online version of the article has some missing words and other problems, but it includes the important stuff.
I know – this is the third posting about the 2007-08 Annual Report of the Tennessee Judiciary. I can’t help myself – I am fascinated by this kind of data. This falls in the "can you believe this" category? There were about the same number of DUI charges filed in circuits court in…
The 2007-08 Annual Report of the Tennessee Judiciary also has some interesting statistics on appeals. Here are some of the highlights: There were 793 Rule 11 applications filed during the fiscal year. ( A Rule 11 application is a request for the Tennessee Supreme Court to hear a discretionary appeal.) …
The Tennessee Supreme Court has just released the 2007-08 “Annual Report of the Tennessee Judiciary.” It includes data for the 2007-08 fiscal year. Here is some of the information revealed in the report: There were 537 medical malpractice cases filed during the fiscal year. That is down almost 10% from the 584…
Are you a subscriber to Tennessee Trial Law Report – Tort Law Edition? The January 2009 issue is now available. The January edition contains Part One of a three-part article on motions in limine as well as a listing of 29 cases currently pending before the Tennessee Supreme Court or the…
The Department of Transportation has a site dedicated to car safety. The site gives information about safety recalls, defect investigations, and early warning reports. Want to learn more? Go here.
Plaintiff’s lawyers: do you want to have the hell scared out of you? Read this article by Rick Swedloff on Medicare subrogation entitled "Can’t Settle, Can’t Sue: How Congress Stole Tort Remedies From Medicare Beneficiaries." The article appears in Volume 41.2 of the Akron Law Review. [A 2003 amendment to…
There is a lot of talk about capping fees in medical malpractice cases. Fees are already capped, of course, at one-third of the recovery, but the health care industry wants further limitation on fees charged to plaintiffs in successful cases. Why? Because they’re not stupid. They understand that a lower fee…
Do you have a Sec. 1983 lawsuit for injuries to a bystander arising out of a police chase? Are you thinking about filing one? Are you defending one? If the answer to any of these questions is "Yes," I encourage you to read "When Innocent Parties Are Injured or Killed…