Why sue every physician on the patient’s chart? One reason, via KevinMD (May 6): “Plaintiffs’ lawyers love it when physicians point fingers at each other. They can just sit back and watch the doctors destroy each other.” (Berkeley Rice, “Watch out for this malpractice trap!”, Medical Economics, May 5).
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In medical; shotgun defendant selection
I understood the intention of this lawyer tactic.
On the other side of the coin, defendant doctor crossclaims against all the other physicians prevent the settling of a nuisance frivolous lawsuit without getting permission of the doctor making the crossclaim. Let the settling doctor pay all the other doctors for their expenses and trouble, if he wants to pay the plaintiff.
If a doctor tries to betray his colleagues by settling for some low amount, he still has to answer to the other defendant making a crossclaim against him. without the crossclaim, he can weasel out of the lawsuit. The offer of a settlement will be taken as an admission of culpability, by anyone with common sense, including jurors, no matter what the settlement contract says. Formal legal crossclaims prevent disloyalty.
Furthermore, plaintiff offer to not report the settling doctor to the National Practitioner Data Bank are unlawful, and should be voided in any settlement contract. The crossclaiming doctor can see to that.
My mother-in-law was operated on a few years ago using a procedure that was considered cutting-edge at the time. When my father-in-law tried to straighten out her billing and find out which doctor had done what, it turned out that several physicians had simply stopped by her room to look and see how she was doing, and billed for it. Perhaps such “curiosity billing” might diminish under the proposed rule.
better still, if you can get more than one doctor to settle without telling the rest of them you cash in multiple times for the price of one lawyer.
I worked at a firm in Baltimore. We had a slander case where a person was fired for stealing from the building’s restaurant. The owner of the restaurant told the building manager who told the plaintiff’s employer. The firm sued the restaurateur for slander.
I asked, “Why aren’t we suing the building manager? He made the false statement too.” The complaint was amended and the building manager ended up quickly settling for a quick $8000!
“better still, if you can get more than one doctor to settle without telling the rest of them you cash in multiple times for the price of one lawyer.”
Actually, most states require you to set off prior settlements for the same damages.
“Actually, most states require you to set off prior settlements for the same damages.”
You must have missed the “without telling the rest of them” part. How could that be enforced? And how often successfully?
In the few malpractice cases I have been a part of, my experience was that the tactic of sitting back and letting the doctors point fingers at each other is about as effective as sitting back and waiting for a tycoon to adopt you. They don’t do it very often. Instead, they all submit declarations saying either that the other doctors “did a great job” or that the decision that led to the injury was “a judgment call.”