Defense lawyers are often obsessed with getting the victim’s mental health records. They rarely bear the juicy fruit they seek. But this does not deter them.
In St. Luke Institute Inc. v. Jones (No. 62, Sept. Term 2019), the Maryland Court of Appeals laid out a step-by-step roadmap for when and how litigants can get confidential mental health records in civil discovery.
The process for getting confidential mental health records in civil discovery are now as follows:
My law firm limits its law practice to personal injury cases on behalf of victims. We started our firm in 2002, on a shoestring, a wing, and a prayer, we had potentially lucrative opportunities to jump out to handle other types of case.
Was I tempted? I was tempted. But personal injury is our true wheelhouse and we stayed there. But over the last 18 years, we have handled many different types of personal injury cases.
What is personal injury? The term “personal injury case” is sort of an umbrella phrase that refers to any type of tort lawsuit in which a plaintiff has been physically injured and is suing someone for compensation. There are many different types or categories of personal injury claims under this umbrella. They range from very simple slip and fall cases to extremely complex medical malpractice cases.
here is no law in Maryland requiring shoes or prohibiting certain types of footwear while driving. However, driving while barefoot or wearing shoes such as high heels or flip-flops can be unsafe. Improper footwear affects your ability to apply pressure to your pedals or pivot between them. They can even cause you to hit both pedals at once.
You should avoid wearing the following types of shoes while driving. These shoes can impair your ability to control your vehicle’s pedals.
The reason women do not report sexual harassment is their fear of retaliation from the harasser and her employer. This is particularly true when the harasser has a position of power within the organization.
Juries are made up mostly of people in the workplace. So they get it. Jurors often side with the victim in discrimination cases where there is evidence of retaliation for reporting sexual harassment and the organization did nothing to stop it.
There are two types of workplace harassment under federal law: sexual harassment and retaliatory harassment. This post focus on retaliation.
States are split on whether tort liability may be imposed on local governments for police brutality/excessive force/misconduct cases. Some states permit the imposition of tort liability for their police officers’ intentional actions while on the job. Some refuse to impose tort liability, arguing that such conduct is not within the scope of employment. The Maryland Court of Appeals issued a new opinion that stakes out Maryland’s position on this issue with newfound clarity.
At issue in Baltimore City Police Dept. v. Potts, 468 Md. 265 (2020) was criminal misconduct by Baltimore City police officers could be considered actions within the scope of their employment under the Local Government Tort Claims Act (“LGTCA”). The misconduct here was next level. Stopping suspects without probable cause, assaulting them, and planting handguns on suspects to give them grounds for arrest.
Maryland’s Court of Appeals held that these actions were within the scope of the officer’s employment because they were done in furtherance of police business and incidental to authorized police conduct. Therefore, the Police Department could be held liable under the LGTCA.
The qui tam lawyers at my firm represent corporate whistleblowers in lawsuits under the False Claims Act involving fraud and other illegal schemes.
Under the Federal False Claims Act (FCA) and the Maryland False Claims Act (MFCA), anyone with direct knowledge of corporate fraud that is costing the government money can file a lawsuit against and earn a percentage of any money recovered.
These types of whistleblower lawsuits by private citizens on behalf of the government are known as “qui tam” lawsuits.
In Billing v. Moulsdale, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals overturned a defense verdict and granted the plaintiff a new trial in malpractice lawsuit on damages only.
What the doctor was found to have done as a matter of law is pretty gross doctor are pretty gross. Essentially, and you can read the case if you want all the details, the doctor performed a breast and vaginal exam on a patient that was completely unrelated to the care he was providing.
Was this a onetime thing? It never is. Dr. Moulsdale surrendered his medical license after more women than just the plaintiff accused him of performing unwarranted and unnecessary breast, pelvic and rectal examinations on several female patients.
In Adventist Healthcare Inc. v. Mattingly, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals (COSA) was asked to consider whether a mother’s decision to cremate her son’s remains amounted to the destruction of evidence in a subsequent lawsuit for medical malpractice. The COSA ruled that having remains cremated does not constitute spoliation of evidence in a subsequent malpractice case. The Court held that family members have no duty to preserve evidence from the body or allow potential malpractice defendants to examine the body independently.
The decedent (Mattingly) underwent surgery to reverse a colostomy at Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland. Five days after the surgery, Mr. Mattingly died while still in the hospital. Mattingly’s mother was with him at the hospital when he died, and she immediately suspected that the doctors and staff had been negligent. She wanted an autopsy performed to learn the cause of her son’s death, but she didn’t trust anyone at the hospital to give her an honest opinion.
In its final decision of the Term, Maryland’s Court of Appeals gave us an (arguably) game-changing decision Rochkind v. Stevenson. The court announced that it was discarding the old Frye-Reed rule and formally adopting the Daubert test for the admissibility of expert testimony. We all knew we would get here one day. And here we finally are.
The case that gave rise to this appellate decision began back in 2011 when the plaintiff brought a lead paint case against her former landlord, Stanley Rochkind. The Rochkind name has been ubiquitous in the lead paint world, having been the defendant in hundreds of claims over the last 25 years that were covered by multiple insurers.
Defendants in medical malpractice cases will frequently defend themselves by pointing the finger of blame at another doctor who was involved in the plaintiff’s treatment. Sort of. They talk about but rarely do they put on the case with expert testimony. They just make a lot of rumblings about it in discovery.
Usually, the doctor who gets blamed is not a defendant in the malpractice case. I call this defense strategy “blaming the empty chair.” This defense strategy can be very effective in certain situations. Juries often feel sympathetic for injured plaintiffs, but may be reluctant to condemn the defendant doctors. The empty chair defense offers jurors a tempting “scapegoat” in this context. It is always so much easier to blame the guy who is not in the room. We do it all the time in our personal lives. (Clint Eastwood is a huge fan.)
