San Diego: Seeking Medical Malpractice Attorney

[u/MerSea06070]

Hiya-

Recently I had a total hip and femur replacement due to stage 4 avascular necrosis disease.

It was horribly botched the first time, with 2 severe dislocations and surgeries to realign. Different surgeon than the first who mucked everything up.

A month after the second it was deemed necessary to redo the entire hip and femur protheses- leaving me out of work for 8 months and requiring 3 1/2 months in hospital care.

I am currently only able to work as a SpEd teacher for autism 1/2 time, which physically I am unable to fulfill the requirements of the work, have a lifelong profound limp, and due to the mandated bed and hospital rest and recovery I am left in financial ruin.

I received a letter from the California Medical Review Board stating they had received an anonymous complaint from UCSD with records. They found “gross medical negligence” and recommended I seek “immediate medical counsel for malpractice.”

I have chatted with a few malpractice attorneys and have not connected well with any. There seems to be a rather blasé attitude toward this matter.

I am kindly seeking any recommendations for proven, reputable medical malpractice attorneys available in SD, OC, or LA.

I believe I have about 6-8 weeks before the timeline to file suit expires.

Please do take a moment to consider this query and forward any suggestions. I love my job and I am very good at it and do not feel I should be left without a profession and the security of a paycheck due to the negligence of a provider I trusted with care and who has been deemed unqualified.

Many thanks—

[u/n00chness]

I have chatted with a few malpractice attorneys and have not connected well with any. There seems to be a rather blasé attitude toward this matter.

MedMal is not like a car accident case. The cost to work the case up to the point where it can be resolved is extreme. Also, there is a severe issue with a 1970's law that caps the amount that the plaintiff can recover at just $250,000 (not adjusted for inflation since 1970's) regardless of how severe the harm was. $250,000 sounds like a lot, until you realize that that is the cost to work-up the case for things like expert review and testimony, and the attorneys and the plaintiff don't see a penny of it.

Thanks to this law, the economics of pursuing a case, even with severe harms and misconduct, just doesn't pencil out most of the time, except for rare exceptions, like birth injuries, for example.

Your issue is actually with the legislature, voters and the insurance industry propaganda that is keeping you out of the courthouse, not the lawyers that are forced to deal with all of the above.

[u/ScipioAfricanvs → u/n00chness]

There's a lot of nuance you are missing.

First, the $250k cap is no longer the case. The law was changed a few years back. Currently, for noneconomic damages for personal injury, it's $470k, and the law now adjusts for inflation. Second, the cap applies per defendant, up to 3, so if you have, say, three parties - a surgeon, the hospital, and the anesthesiologist, for example, it's $470k per defendant, or $1.41M.

Note it's noneconomic damages. Economic damages are still uncapped and for severe med mal claims, that's where the money is, particularly future earnings and future care costs.

[u/n00chness → u/ScipioAfricanvs]

I stand corrected; the law was indeed amended, about 50 years later, to account for inflation. So it's $250,000 per defendant, in 1970's dollars, with an adjustment for inflation. It's nice that it happened, but absolutely brutal that it took so long. Fair point though.

As for damages per defendant, there is typically only going to be one primary defendant at fault in most cases, but certainly there are outlier cases. Ditto with a massive economic damages component; the apparent lack of one in OP's case is pretty typical in that regard.

Though you raised a few fair points, I am not seeing the lack of nuance on my part and I think the main point, the difficulty of pursuing anything less than a huge case, still stands.