Malpractice attorney calls case bizarre’
The $18.7 million default judgment against a California hospital is a bizarre development that suggests some unusual misconduct is at work behind the scenes, says an uninvolved but highly experienced malpractice attorney.
Richard W. Boone, JD, is an attorney in Vienna, VA, who specializes in medical malpractice, often representing defendants. After reviewing court transcripts from the Desoto case, he tells Healthcare Risk Management he has never seen such egregious conduct by the defense. "You can’t just accept what the plaintiff’s attorney said happened in this case, but even if you discount the accusations by half, this still is a pretty blatant failure to make discovery on the part of the hospital," he says. "It’s frankly quite surprising. I just can’t imagine what benefit they thought they would receive."
Boone goes on to say that the defense attorneys’ alleged conduct is "beyond aggressive. If what the plaintiff’s attorney says even remotely approaches what really happened, we’ve gone beyond permissively aggressive and gotten into the area of deliberate attempts to frustrate legitimate inquiry."
Many of the allegations are disturbing, Boone says, but the deposition corrections by J.A. Makena Marangu, MD, move the allegations way beyond charges of slow discovery. While stressing that he has no personal knowledge of the defense attorneys’ actions or the veracity of Marangu’s deposition, Boone says he would be devastated to find himself mentioned in such an amendment.
"That document is in effect accusing someone of conduct which is . . . sure as hell criminal back here in Virginia. The bar’s disciplinary committee would go after you with a chain saw," he says.
Boone also is intrigued by the fact that the hospital’s risk management department has been restructured and is now the subject of a lawsuit itself. "This sounds like a really unhappy hospital to me," he says. "It really makes me wonder if there was a complete flow of information back and forth between the defense attorneys and the hospital."
Doctor’s dispute may have complicated case
The attorney notes that some plaintiffs’ attorneys will see this case as confirmation that there is a "conspiracy of silence" in hospitals and that defense attorneys are willing to do anything to win a case. Neither is true, he says, and this case should not be seen as any sort of condemnation of defense attorneys.
Reading between the lines a bit, Boone suggests that possibly this malpractice case was more involved than it appears at first glance. While the injury leading to the lawsuit does not seem extraordinary, Boone says Marangu’s dispute involving his plastic surgery residency may have turned the case into a morass involving interpersonal conflicts. If so, that could explain some of the unusual activity, he says.
"Once in a while, risk managers get involved in a case with a lot of interpersonal conflicts, where there is so much rancor and dissension that the hospital will wind up losing no matter what," he says. "I wonder if this was a situation the risk manager just couldn’t control because it was more than a malpractice case."
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