Med Mal Master Class
- Case intake
- Overall thoughts on case intake
- Approach to specific cases (e.g., surgical error, delayed cancer diagnosis, emergency room, birth injury, vascular)
- Efficiently deciding what cases to obtain records, get expert review, and file
- Assembling your experts
- Which experts do you need?
- Where to find them
- How to best engage the experts and communicate with the experts
- Difficult to find experts
- Complaint drafting
- Naming defendants to prevent empty chairs
- Maximizing collectability
- Drafting the complaint to ensure relation back in the future
- Institutional negligence
- Maximizing your evidence through discovery
- Obtaining important discovery outside the medical records – policies and procedures, communications not in the records, insurance policies
- Audit trail discovery
- Depositions – defendant doctors/nurses, treating physicians, plaintiff experts, defense experts
- Literature – good literature to support your case
- Trial preparation
- MILs
- Demonstrative exhibits – education of medical concepts, right way wrong way, effective timelines
- Order of witnesses
- High tech, low tech – using flip charts, models, and animations
- Voir dire (see attached – Housen 76M birth injury, Fern 32M vascular case, foot off, Florez 50M birth injury)
- Deselecting bad med mal jurors
- Doctors are just like the rest of us
- Who has courage?
- No such thing as “poisoning the well” (with a couple exceptions)
- Adverse examination of the Defendant (see attached – Housen obstetrician, Fern family practice, Bagga general surgeon)
- Kill shots
- No oxygen
- 80/20 rule
- Direct of the Plaintiff’s expert
- ABC – always be closing
- Locking in your proofs
- Dos and don’ts – prepping the witness to be his or her best
- Cross of defense experts
- Using literature
- Using evidence at trial
- Focus on the facts
- Credibility and impressions
- Closing and rebuttal (see attached Housen/Fern/Florez)
- Lowering the burden
- Boiling the complex down to its essence
- Connecting with jurors
- Predicting defendant’s closing – being armed for rebuttal