Advice to Young Lawyers #10

Dear Mr. Schaeffer:

I am a lawyer who recently became engaged to a woman whose father is a doctor. Whenever I visit my fiancé’s parents, all her father talks about is “frivolous lawsuits” and “my goddamn malpractice insurance rates.” This generally lasts about ten minutes until my fiancé’s mother says, “Herman, it’s time for your pill.” Once the pill kicks in, the rest of us are able to finish our dinner, even though all that snoring can get pretty loud.

Here’s my dilemma: When, if ever, should I tell my future father-in-law that I’m a lawyer? For months, I’ve been telling him I’m an unemployed auto mechanic. Since he seems fine with this, I really don’t want to rock the boat.

Signed, Petrified in Peoria

Dear Petrified:

It’s always fun to get a letter dealing with an important topic that’s been “in the news.” Your letter, of course, deals with complaints by the medical profession of skyrocketing malpractice insurance premiums, which have reportedly been causing doctors looking for cheaper rates to move from state to state like migrant farm workers. (The only real difference between the two groups, in fact, is that doctors have much bigger TVs, in additional to several TIVOs.) Understandably, doctors are upset about the way their malpractice insurance premiums have been cutting into their “quality of life.” Fearing retaliation, however, they are unable to criticize their insurance companies. So they’ve come up with another plan: blame “greedy trial lawyers.”

You probably think your situation is very dire. But it’s not. In a recent interview in Trial magazine, the former insurance commissioner of Missouri, Jay Angoff, explained that “the industry is cyclical” and “very soon insurance companies will start cutting rates again, just as they did in the late 1980s and mid-1990s.” In other words, it’s going to get better for the cash-strapped doctors very soon.

Do you have to wait for the insurance companies to make the first move? Not necessarily. It could be that your future father-in-law thinks about lawyers the way Jonathan Swift thought about humanity: “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” It’s quite possible, in other words, that your future father-in-law may harbor some generalized love for lawyers in the abstract. You might scoff at this, but it is well known that doctors are some of the most litigious members of our society. I have personally worked on two cases in which I represented a doctor who was suing another doctor. In the first case, I won. In the second, I lost, and the doctor turned around and sued me. So there you go.

Here’s my advice. If you want to be a hero, sit with your future father-in-law in his living room before he’s taken his pill. Find out a little about his enemies. After he opens up to you (you’ll know when his face begins to turn bright red), reveal that you’re a lawyer. If he doesn’t keel over then and there, which would be a shortcut to solving your problem, offer to have a lawsuit prepared against the doctor’s enemies by the next morning. To avoid taxing his household budget more than his insurers are doing already, offer to do the work pro bono.

If you follow this advice very carefully, everyone stands to benefit. Your fiancé will have peace within her family, and you’ll have either a new client or a dead future father-in-law. It’s as simple as that!

Your friend, Evan Schaeffer

Related posts:

1. Advice to Families of Lawyers #1

2. Advice to Young Lawyers #8

3. Advice to Law Professors #2

4. The "Advice" Category -- all fourteen advice posts

Comments

[Dave!]

I did hear a good piece on NPR the other week about the malpractice bugaboo and doctors. The most interesting point was that the *vast* majority of doctors who lose malpractice suits retain their liceneses to practice. On the surface, that seems somewhat reasonable... doctors might like to pretend they are gods, and patients might like to hope they are gods, but they are, in reality, human just like the rest of us, and thus capable of mistakes. What struck me was that there seemed to be no licensing penalties for *multiple* malpractice occurances, and even when docs lost in court, they rarely lost their liceneses. Seems to me *that* is where the high cost of malpractice insurance is coming from... the doctors themselves.

[Dylan]

Has it occurred to you that the medical field might have a rational belief that the average malpractice verdict is based on bullshit and in no way actually reflects what is actually reasonable care?

No, I don't believe it either. But just because the law holds you liable for something doesn't mean you actually did anything wrong.

[Karl]

Fucking Brilliant!!!

Another young lawyer learning at the knee of a master.

[Dave!]

Actually, that *did* occur to me... but it wasn't shocking to me that they lost in court, but rather how many of them were reprimanded *by their own sactioning bodies*, without any penalties on their licenses.

[Ted]

Fairly comprehensive studies have shown that malpractice verdicts are correlated with the result to the patient, rather than the quality of care provided, which is why Senator Edwards loved the brain-damaged baby cases. Most malpractice doesn't result in lawsuits; most lawsuits don't involve malpractice. It's unclear to me why anyone thinks the current system is effective.