Final Thoughts On Discovery

Once your lawyer receives and organizes discovery, the contents are evaluated closely – in and out of context. The stuff must be turned over, looking at it from every angle. In the movie, My Cousin Vinnie, Joe Pesci’s character teaches this lesson using a playing card. He shows the card to his young client with […]

Failed Episiotomy Bench Verdict

A federal judge has awarded $5 million to a New Hampshire woman who suffered years of pain and scarring after a botched surgery at an Army hospital to repair an injury she received in childbirth. The link to the NH bench verdict is here,

Trial Story: Did I Just Say That Out Loud?

“Your Honor, I distinctly heard someone at Mr. Thompson’s table say the word “cheeses”.” I thought I’d mumbled it under my breath. Apparently not. It was a bench trial and there was no jury so things had gotten a little loose after a day or two of everyone getting comfortable with one another. Maybe too […]

Mudlarks United

I watched the American Bar Association’s recommendation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It all made sense. She’s highly qualified. We can all celebrate that she served as a public defender, tried civil rights cases, and served as a trial judge before being elevated. These are qualities that are historically underrepresented […]

Hospital Medication Errors Can Be Fatal (And Concealed)

The patient was supposed to get Versed, a sedative intended to calm her before being scanned in a large, MRI-like machine. But Vaught accidentally grabbed vecuronium, a powerful paralyzer, which stopped the patient’s breathing and left her brain-dead before the error was discovered. That was in a prestigious Tennessee hospital. The link is here. I had […]

What To Expect When You Come Between The Fortune 500 and Their Bottom Line

Marketing can cover a lot of warts. Meanwhile, in the real world, people behave in line with our experience and the incentives put in front of them, even where it conflicts with what we know to be right and wrong. From the NYT, Mr. Williams said a State Farm claims adjuster told him that she […]

“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.”

Bruce Lee said it: strip away the distraction of things you don’t need and you make room for what matters. This principle applies to business and life as well as it does martial arts. This exercise may feel unproductive (it is not) – you can’t distinguish the wheat from the chaff while multitasking or juggling […]

We Are Responsible To Our Elderly: The Greatest Generation

In the end, we all got COVID-19. We were in the first line of fire. But the ones who bore the brunt of the virus were the residents. On April 20, 2020, when I caught it, 63 of the 180 residents at the home had already died. It was total chaos. We were forbidden from referring […]