The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance has released the forms for reporting on medical malpractice claims for the 2009 calendar year.
The reports are due March 1, 2010.
Here are the instructions for filling out forms as a representative of the claimant. Here is the link to the reporting form.
If you do not regularly read Max Kennerly’s Litigation and Trial blog you are not taking advantage of a wonderful opportunity to learn. I have never met Max, but his blog is well-written, thoughtful, and informative.
Need to be convinced? Read his post titled "Always Draft Angry Briefs. Never File Them."
An excerpt:
Jay O’Keeffe has written a nice article about appellate brief writing on DeNovo: A Virginia Appellate Law Blog.
The article is titled " 10 Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Brief." Here is an excerpt:
1. Take shortcuts. Here’s how you write a brief: brainstorm, research, brainstorm, outline, draft, revise, cite check. Skipping any of these steps to save time will backfire. If you don’t outline, it will take you twice as long to write, and your brief will likely be poorly structured and repetitive. If you don’t brainstorm, then you may miss a key point. If you don’t cite-check, you will be embarrassed sooner or later. And if you don’t research or revise, then may God have mercy on your soul.
Here is the best summary I have seen that describes the recent changes to the FRCP. The new rules went into effect on December 1, 2009. The summary was written by the folks at Mayer Brown.
Thanks to Dan Hull at What About Clients? for alerting me to it.
A law professor at Stanford, Lora Freeman Engstrom, has written an article published in Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics called "Run-of-the-Mill Justice." Her bio reveals that her research interest is high-volume personal injury law practices that heavily advertise and mass-produce the resolution of claims and is supported by a grant from the American Bar Association’s Litigation Research Fund.
Here is an abstract of the article:
This Article examines a particular form of heretofore unexamined personal injury law practice that has proliferated across the United States. These law firms, which I call settlement mills, are characterized by their high claim volume, aggressive advertising, significant delegation to non-attorneys, entrepreneurial focus, and quick resolution of claims, typically without initiation of suit. Drawing on voluminous documents extracted from federal court and state bar disciplinary files, as well as fifty interviews with current and past law firm employees, the Article demonstrates that settlement mills represent a relatively new, largely distinct, and surprisingly prevalent form of law firm organization. After setting forth the characteristics that distinguish settlement mills from conventional personal injury practices, the Article considers the forces that have contributed to their rise, analyzes how they resolve claims in practice and to what effect, and asks why insurers (not facing a realistic threat of trial) bargain with settlement mills at all. The analysis reveals that settlement mills are not only organized differently than their conventional counterparts; they actually settle claims differently, in a manner that challenges prevailing theories of settlement as well as our basic notions of compensation through tort.
The good folks at the Winning Trial Advocacy Tips blog have assembled some more great information of interest to trial lawyers. This post is titled "Free Software for Trial Lawyers‘ and features a dozen free or almost free programs of interest to lawyers who try personal injury and wrongful death cases.
An excerpt from the post:
IMAGE EDITING PROGRAMS
Gary Gwilliam from California has written a very interesting article called "Old Warriers" for Plaintiff Magazine. Read the article here.
The Star-Tribune from Minneapolis – St. Paul reports that a state court judge in Minnesota imposed a $4 million sanction against Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. for engaging in a "staggering" pattern of misconduct aimed at covering up its role in the deaths of four young people whose car collided with a train largely because a crossing gate wasn’t working properly.
The paper reports that the railroad began destroying evidence within minutes of the incident.
The trial judge, Ellen Maas, found that the railroad company lost or fabricated evidence, interfered with the families’ investigation of the accident and "knowingly advanced lies, misleading facts and/or misrepresentations" in order to conceal the truth and "has attempted to explain away each instance of misconduct as either an innocent mistake or a mere coincidence. … "
A recent post described proposed changes to the Local Rules of Court for the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. For the most part, the rule changes addressed changes in the time periods for action required under the rules.
This post from Drug and Device Law that explains the proposed changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Here is an excerpt:
The new theme is "days are days." All days are to be counted. If a deadline falls on a weekend day, a federal holiday, or a day when filing is impossible because the Clerk’s office is closed or inaccessible, then the deadline falls to the next available day. Deadlines shorter than 30 days have been changed to multiples of seven (7) days, so that more often than not, the deadline will fall on a weekday. Other changes affect how to tell when the last day of a period ends, how to compute hourly time periods, how to calculate a time period when the clerk’s office is inaccessible, and how to compute backward-counted periods that end on a weekend or holiday. The rules also clarify the long held understanding that when e-filing is involved, a due date runs until midnight in the time zone of that court’s clerk’s office.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has fined a lawyer $100 for providing an improper citation to a court case. The fine was imposed in a footnote in 2008 unpublished opinion, Espitia v. Fouche. Here is the footnote:
Counsel for Espitia cites to an unpublished case assertedly upholding a stipulated damages clause due to the difficulty of ascertaining "the exact amount of income certain vending machines would produce." The cite provided is "Buellesbach v. Roob, 2005 AP 160 (Ct.App.Dist.I)." Buellesbach indeed is unpublished but it has nothing to do with liquidated damage clauses or vending machines; it is a misrepresentation case brought by newlyweds against a wedding photographer. Also, "2005 AP 160" is the docket number, which we discovered only after reaching a dead end at 2005 WI App 160, 285 Wis.2d 472, 702 N.W.2d 433. At last we located the unpublished case that addresses the subject matter for which counsel cited Buellesbach: Stansfield Vending, Inc. v. Osseo Truck Travel Plaza, LLC, 2003 WI App 201, 267 Wis.2d 280, 670 N.W.2d 558. Different name, different citation, different district (District IV) but, as promised, unpublished. It is a violation of Wis. Stat. Rule 809.19(1)(e) to provide citations which do not conform to the Uniform System of Citation and of Wis. Stat. Rule 809.23(3) to cite to unpublished opinions. One reason may be that they can be time-consuming to locate. A $100 penalty is imposed against Espitia’s counsel. See Hagen v. Gulrud, 151 Wis.2d 1, 8, 442 N.W.2d 570 (Ct.App.1989).
We have a bigger problem in Tennessee. I was having lunch with an appellate court judge recently and we were discussing how West (or whatever its name is now) is taking briefs written by lawyers and selling them to other lawyers. The judge remarked that courts were seeing one of the effects of this, with lawyers cutting and pasting from the briefs of other lawyers who had written on the same area of law. How did the judges know the material had been written by another lawyer? The "new" brief still contained the names of the parties from the "old" brief.
Day on Torts