New Year's Resolutions 2000

December 9, 1999
Revised January 9, 2000

Since none of us is immune from the allure of self-improvement that goes along with making New Year’s resolutions, I hereby resolve that for the coming year in handling medical malpractice cases I will:

1. Decline all requests to take the defendant doctor’s deposition at his office.

2. Tread very cautiously when evaluating any informed consent case.

3. Explain to new clients the difference between bad result and bad medicine.

4. Resist the temptation to join additional, yet peripheral, doctors as defendants.

5. Not scream the next time I get a boilerplate interrogatory in a wrongful death case which asks whether my client has returned to work.

6. Beware of clients who say they are not interested in money, they just want the doctor’s license on a silver platter.

7. Say a nightly prayer that the Pa. Supreme Court and/or the state legislature will finally recognize the wisdom in making the CAT Fund liable for bad faith.

8. Remember that these two questions go together like peanut butter and jelly, “Do you have a demand?” “Do you have consent to settle?”

9. Not snicker when I see that my request for medical records has been copied to the hospital’s Risk Management Department.

10. Solve the mystery as to why medical records departments have a chronic inability to send the right records in response to a proper request.

11. Remain civil when a defense lawyer makes speaking objections to rescue the doctor during his or her deposition.

12. Not file a Complaint until I have all expert reports in hand.

13. Not hold my breath waiting for the abolition of the CAT Fund.

14. Encourage all our Medical Malpractice Section members to make greater use of our ListServe.

15. Not go ballistic when the defendant tells me that the defendant doctor only does depositions on Thursday afternoons.