• New FASB regulation may provide fodder for trial lawyers: publicly disclose your internal analysis of liability (thus giving away crucial settlement information and attracting more lawsuits), and/or face lawsuits when your disclosure turns out to be incorrect. [CFO.com; CFO.com; NLJ/law.com ($); FASB RFC]
• NBC settles a “You-made-me-commit-suicide-by-exposing-my-pedophilia” lawsuit. [LA Times; WSJ Law Blog; Conradt v. NBC Universal]
• A victim of overwarning? 17-year-old loses hat on Six Flags Batman roller-coaster ride, ignores multiple warning signs to jump multiple fences into unauthorized area, retrieves hat, loses head. [FoxNews/AP; Atlanta Journal-Constitution; TortsProf]
• Lots of Ninth Circuit reversals this term, as per usual. [The Recorder/law.com]
• A no-Twinkie defense doesn’t fly in a maid-beating case. [CNN/AP via ATL]
• The Chinese government demonstrates that it can enforce laws against IP piracy when it wants to [Marginal Revolution]
• “Justice Scalia said he thought that the United States was ‘over-lawed,’ leading to too many lawyers in the country. ‘I don’t think our legal system should be that complex. I think that any system that requires that many of the country’s best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex. If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don’t go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn’t produce anything.’” [Telegraph]
• Above the Law commenters decidedly unimpressed by my looks. Looking forward to feminists rushing to my defense against “silencing insults.” [Above the Law]

The recent flurry of press attention to medical apology prompted this anecdotal recollection from Michael O’Hare at Same Facts (May 18) of his work 25 years ago on a Massachusetts state commission to address the malpractice issue:

The story was that soon after [in-house hospital lawyer] Fred arrived, he was assigned to get on top of malpractice claims, and he sat down with six months’ worth of files. All of them, he discovered, began with a collection action for non-payment of a bill. So he ordered the accounting office to send him every overdue account before any efforts at collection, and invited the deadbeat patient into his office for a conversation. Invariably, the patient was withholding payment because he thought he had been mistreated. Often, the patient was right. The next meeting was with the practitioner accused of having screwed up, and the outcome was sometimes an apology and a promise to fix the problem for free (for example, another operation at no charge to retrieve the forgotten sponge), sometimes an expression of regret for a bad outcome with an explanation that the hospital hadn’t actually erred: not everything in medicine works every time. Of course this required that Sanders and Fred drive out fear, so the staffers could be honest and sympathetic.

The result of this was a really spectacular reduction in malpractice costs, even counting in the “warranty service” repairs; I don’t remember the numbers but it was on the order of more than half, partly in fees to defense lawyers, partly in claim payments. Frequently the bill even got paid. The reduction in lawsuits occurred both when the hospital was wrong and said so, and when it was right and said so; it turned out a lot of the injured patients just wanted to tell a live person what had happened to them and get an apology. Of course the public relations benefits are enormous, if hard to measure. And quality always goes up when your own people aren’t afraid to talk to each other about instructive mistakes.

It’s notable that Fred’s pay didn’t depend on how many cases he litigated….

Full post here. More thoughts on medical apology: Melissa Clouthier, May 19.