Shepherd on “Justice in Crisis: Victim Access to the American Medical Liability System”

Joanna Shepherd (Emory) has posted “Justice in Crisis: Victim Access to the American Medical Liability System” to SSRN.  The abstact provides:

An often overlooked problem with the current medical malpractice system is the vast number of medical errors that go uncompensated. Although studies indicate that one percent of hospital patients are victims of medical negligence, fewer than two percent of these injured patients file claims. In this Article, I explain that many victims of medical malpractice do not file claims because they are unable to find attorneys willing to take their cases. I conduct the first national survey of attorneys that explores medical malpractice victims’ access to the civil justice system. The results from the survey indicate that the economic reality of litigation forces many medical malpractice attorneys to reject legitimate cases. In fact, over 75 percent of the attorneys in my survey indicate that they reject more than 90 percent of the cases that they screen. The attorneys indicate that insufficient damages and high litigation expenses are their primary reasons for rejecting cases and that several tort reforms have reduced their willingness to accept cases. Moreover, the majority of the attorneys respond that they have threshold damage values, below which they will not consider accepting a case. In fact, over half of the attorneys responded that, even for a case they are almost certain to win on the merits, they will not accept the case unless expected damages are at least $250,000. For a case that they are only slightly likely to win, the vast majority of attorneys require minimum expected damages of $500,000 to accept the case. Because of the high cost of medical malpractice litigation, plaintiffs’ attorneys simply cannot economically justify taking cases with damages below these thresholds. As a result, many legitimate victims of medical malpractice are left with no legal representation and no meaningful access to the civil justice system.  

– SBS