The attorney-client privilege protects private communications between a client and a lawyer. This sensible rule promotes a full and frank discussion so that the client can get the best advice without the interference of prying eyes and ears. It assumes the communications are strictly private – not in the presence of anyone other than the client and lawyer. It also assumes no disclosures to third parties that would waive the privilege – by the client or the lawyer. Here’s an example to illustrate the point: Let’s say that early in my career handling plaintiffs’ medical malpractice claims, a client drove his car through a hospital’s glass front. The fact of the accident is not attorney-client privileged. I could write about the fact that my client was found in his car, half in and half out of the hospital window, without violating my ethical duty to the client. However, my private discussions with my client (before and after) would be privileged, and I couldn’t share them on my blog.

Work-product privilege protects our thoughts, impressions, and strategies in the case—as long as they are not shared in public or with any unauthorized third party (authorized third parties, for instance, would be the many vendors used to help work the case, and the privilege binds them). Staying with our example, my thoughts and opinions about my client ending up in his car half in and half out of the hospital plate glass window would be privileged unless and until I made those thoughts or opinions public as part of my client’s case. Included is any discussion of how or why my client told me he was found in his car, half in and half out of the hospital.

Generally speaking (and hypotheticals aside), my job is to pursue civil remedies to obtain justice for my clients. The most effective way to do this is to take steps toward a jury trial. The right to a jury trial is the foundation of every settlement and verdict obtained. The Seventh Amendment to our Constitution is dishonored whenever the right to a jury trial is impaired or legislated out of existence.

The Seventh Amendment right to jury trial comes from the Magna Carta – the King’s deal to avoid violence with his subjects by guaranteeing certain rights, including the right to jury trial. Causing violence to property and persons is always counterproductive to pursuing a jury trial. But that assumes the existence of a meaningful right to a jury trial, as guaranteed by our natural rights under the Constitution.

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Early America adopted English common law and a long history of cherished rights, including the right to trial by jury – which dates back to 1215. In that year, Pope Innocent III issued an order validating a person’s right to a trial by peers. That same year, at Runnymede in England, King John was forced on a battlefield to sign Magna Carta – the ancient pact he made with English Barons, including a stipulation to man’s right to “the lawful judgment of his peers”. These are the events that first set rule of law above kings.

A kid gunned down a health insurance CEO as he walked a busy Manhattan sidewalk into a shareholder’s conference. In America, there’s a certain passion surrounding guns and the Second Amendment. The Surgeon General issued an advisory about an epidemic of gun violence and deaths resulting therefrom. U.S. Surgeon General Issues Advisory on the Public Health Crisis of Firearm Violence in the United States

Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and adolescents. HHS Report on Firearm Violence in America

At the same time, Americans have lost respect for our justice system in record numbers according to Gallup. Trust in court system at record low: Gallup

There are many reasons for both of these trends. They aren’t all related. But here is what I propose. We need a movement similar to the #2A movement to promote jury trials, a right guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment to our Constitution. And we need to invest time and money into improving our court systems and their rules so they can demonstrate their importance to our system of governance.

Self-defense and a well-regulated militia should be a last resort. There wouldn’t be a need for violence if we took our jury trial rights as seriously as our gun rights. Project 7A is designed to start that process.

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Law students who would traditionally experience only a few courtroom scenarios over a semester have begun working with programs that can provide an entire array of courtroom curveballs, thanks to large language model artificial intelligence technology.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1804884?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2024-02-21&read_main=1&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=1?copied=1

Based on real-life experiences, I have suggestions for “curveball” fact patterns to throw at these kids. Here’s one for starters:

Say you’re trying a case against your old boss and his client. It is a two-week-long medical malpractice case involving a birth injury and a brain-damaged baby with moderate to severe cerebral palsy. The defense attorney for the hospital – your old boss – is scheduled in another medical malpractice trial at the same time in a different court. In response to his plea for a continuance (to which you object), the Judge indicates she plans to force a trial of your client’s case each morning for four weeks while his other case is tried for four weeks in the afternoon. Go, young people. What do you do?

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David Dickey, who represents Hannah Waite’s parents, told Law360 on Friday that he proposed settlements of $250,000 to each doctor, but the defense refused and made no offers of their own.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1803831?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2024-02-20&read_main=1&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=0?copied=1

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Here is a Florida appellate court decision that may help with that.

During jury selection, Okaloosa County Circuit Court Judge William F. Stone refused to excuse for cause one of the jurors who Seadler flagged as biased. This meant Seadler was forced to use one of his three peremptory challenges to toss the problematic juror, the justices’ opinion said. Seadler was ultimately forced to accept a different juror he didn’t want and would have removed if he only had that challenge, the opinion said.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1779945?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2023-12-22&read_main=1&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=5?copied=1

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Here is a link to the reported appeals decision in my case.

These are difficult cases, trying for all involved. Press attention can help but can also add to the emotional impact on the parties.

The highly anticipated trial in Sarasota will center on the role of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in the separation of then-10-year-old Maya from her mother, Beata Kowalski, who, after nearly 90 days of being unable to see her daughter because of suspicions that she was making Maya’s condition worse, took her own life in January 2017. The Netflix documentary was released in June.

“Our trial strategy is simple,” the Kowalskis’ attorney Greg Anderson told Law360. “If the truth comes in and I am able to put my case in, I feel very confident that a jury will agree that Maya Kowalski was abused and that Johns Hopkins made an intentional decision to try to force the Kowalskis to agree with their misdiagnosis.”

But the hospital is expected to present evidence at trial that Maya, who arrived at the St. Petersburg hospital on Oct. 7, 2016, significantly underweight and in a wheelchair, did well under the hospital’s care and is living a normal life today. Johns Hopkins maintains that its doctors did their duty as mandatory reporters to report their suspicions of medical abuse to the Florida Department of Children and Families, and it was that agency and a judge who did the investigation and decided to temporarily remove Maya from her parents’ custody.

These thoughts from the Plaintiff’s lawyer ring true based upon my experience.

Anderson, the Kowalskis’ attorney, said he is confident about the facts and the law as it stands applied to the facts, although he says he is concerned about certain pretrial orders excluding evidence that could “cut down the case to something that has no resemblance to what actually happened.”

“If we’re allowed to get the facts in, if the jury’s allowed to hear what actually happened to these folks, I feel very confident,” he said.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1721301?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2023-09-14&read_main=1&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=3?copied=1

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To those involved in corporate litigation, the public’s shifting views toward company loyalty and the employer-employee relationship beg the question: How might experiences and attitudes related to the great resignation affect jurors’ perceptions of large corporations?

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1712681?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2023-08-25&read_main=1&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=18?copied=1

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In oral argument before a three-judge panel in Miami, Discount Rock & Sand’s attorney Andrea Cox told the appeals court that the district court judge erred in allowing jurors to view what she called a “horror show of an animation that was patently misleading” that shows the Discount Rock & Sand truck slamming into the Nissan Rogue carrying the four women on vacation in the Florida Keys.

But the Trial Judge said this was not the original objection to the animation and might have been waived as a result.

But U.S. Circuit Judge Robert J. Luck said he had not found any instance in the record where Discount Rock & Sand had made an objection at trial to showing the video because of its potentially prejudicial value. “The objections seem to me they were mostly about timeliness,” Judge Luck said. “I think you did preserve that, but I don’t know if embedded in there is ‘judge, this thing is prejudicial.'”

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1605678?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2023-05-17&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=16?copied=1

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Hurt was representing the health care providers and, after the court denied his request to withdraw his clients’ response to requests for admission and denied his motion for mistrial, he began sabotaging the trial, according to court documents. He did so by violating court orders on simple evidentiary matters and putting information before the jury that was either not in evidence or that the court excluded from evidence, court documents state.

“Most troubling, however, was his refusal to abide by the court’s very simple and straightforward order not to make any argument contrary to his client’s response to the requests for admission. The record is replete with the court sustaining Mrs. Johnson’s objections to improper argument, the court explaining once again to Mr. Hurt that he could not make that argument and the court instructed the jury to disregard improper argument. Nevertheless, Mr. Hurt was undeterred,” wrote Judge Julie H. O’Kane in her October 2018 decision.

She added that “[w]hen viewed in isolation, each of the incidents mentioned above might not create the type of harm necessary for a mistrial or a new trial.”

“However, when considered cumulatively, the court concludes that Mrs. Johnson was denied a fair trial,” Judge O’Kane said.

The admissions were statements from the health care providers that spoke to the causation of Johnson’s health problems, court documents state. Hurt had argued that the health care providers were “shocked” and “totally surprised” by the admissions, and he told the court he had “no idea that those responses to requests for admissions existed,” according to court documents.

“The court’s finding in its order, entered seven and a half years after the verdict, that Mr. Hurt intended to sabotage the trial after the court denied his motion to withdraw his clients’ responses to requests for admission is simply baseless,” Hurt argued in his initial appeal brief. “The record simply does not demonstrate the type of egregious, intentional, vexatious and bad faith conduct that is required in order for the court to exercise its inherent authority to impose monetary sanctions for alleged bad faith litigation conduct.”

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1677611/fla-atty-can-t-escape-100k-sanction-over-trial-sabotage?copied=1

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And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down on my knees.

Chest Fever was Garth Hudson’s moment to shine in The Band’s live performances. He was allowed to stretch out on the organ, often introducing the song with a proggy solo they called “The Genetic Method”.

Peter Viney called the lyrics “dummy words”, maybe thinking of the nonsense poetry used by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky.

I gave an opening argument once in the throes of an illness that left me dizzy. I’d tried to make myself look well by going into a tanning booth for the first time in my life. I can’t remember if I looked right as I stood, but I do remember sweat pouring off me as I struggled to make it through my presentation.

The responsibility of caring for clients is a privilege and burden. You don’t put down the weight just because you have a cold.

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