The Florida Supreme Court’s recent decision not to reinstate a nearly $31 million jury award against a bar that served alcohol to an underage person who later crashed into a pedestrian was the right call, experts said, and provided much needed clarity on the state’s dram shop statute.

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The establishment in question is a Tallahassee watering hole near the FSU campus frequented by students. Its owner is a locally well-known donor to conservative legislators and the University. If you ignore this and blithely chalk the result up to unidentified “experts” cheering, you’ve done a grave disservice to the plaintiff, the plaintiff’s lawyer, and especially the jury. What a monumental waste of time and resources.

The post This Kind of Courthouse Reporting Reveals a Bias Against Plaintiffs appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

The Sixth District Court of Appeal on Wednesday reversed a Collier County Circuit Court judge’s order granting Universal Property and Casualty Insurance Co.’s motion to dismiss a suit brought by its policyholder Rebecca Hughes, and remanded the case for further proceedings.

Citing the Florida Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Menendez v. Progressive Express Insurance Co. , which established a two-part test to determine whether a statute enacted after a policy’s issuance applies retroactively, the panel concluded that Florida Statute Section 627.70152 cannot be applied retrospectively.

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The post Florida Homeowner Insurance Claims Hoops That You May Have To Jump Through appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

A Pennsylvania appellate court’s recent ruling makes clear that a hospital’s internal documents are generally considered fair game for discovery in medical malpractice suits and the onus is on health care providers to prove otherwise, experts said.

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Texas is one of those states. Recently their Supreme Court had to overturn an appellate court ruling that ruined a legitimate action for years – all because the Appellate court accepted quibbling over the language of the expert reports confirming the merit of the case.

The appeals court faulted the two reports for not including enough details about how Kenmar should have changed Uriegas’ care plan, monitored his condition after the first fall or the specific interventions the facility and its nurses should have implemented, according to court documents.

Choose your lawyer carefully.

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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.

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The post A Difficult Case appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

For instance, I have litigated cases concerning who qualifies as a survivor under Florida’s Wrongful Death Act. I have also litigated changes in the law that allowed new kinds of claims but prohibited some families from taking advantage of changes in the law.

Here’s one that you would have thought would have been decided long ago.

The widow of a mesothelioma victim told the Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday that an appellate court erred when it shoehorned a requirement into the state’s Wrongful Death Act mandating that a surviving spouse be married to a victim before the victim’s injury.

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The post Florida’s Wrongful Death Act: Still Being Interpreted After All These Years appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

“We acknowledged that ‘the Medical Malpractice Act changed the law such that an interlocutory remedy for parties facing claims that fail to satisfy its pre-suit requirements is warranted,’” the court wrote in the rule-change order. “Accordingly, we now amend Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.130(a)(3) to provide for interlocutory review of nonfinal orders that deny a motion to dismiss on the basis of the qualifications of a corroborating witness under subsections 766.102(5)-(9), Florida Statutes.”

Florida Supreme Court Allows Interlocutory Appeals of Pre-Suit Expert Qualifications

The post Fla. Supreme Court Allows Early Dismissal of Medical Malpractice Cases appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

These laws, on the books from the time I became a lawyer, spawned warehouses full of legal challenges, appeals, opinions, and related paperwork. Whether the laws accomplished anything more than a lot of spilled ink and labor is unclear.

And I think appellate courts are beginning to tire of hearing these challenges raised by defendants in every med mal case.

In the opinion, the court amended Florida’s appellate procedure rules to allow interlocutory review of non-final orders denying motions to dismiss based on expert witness qualifications.

The case is the University of Florida Board of Trustees et al. v. Carmody, SC2022-0068, before the Supreme Court of Florida.

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The post Fla. Justices Say Malpractice Claim Met Expert Qualifications appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday that insurance liability lawsuits must be filed within two years of a would-be defendant’s death, upholding a decision dismissing a suit against Lewis Bear Co. and the estate of a now-deceased employee who injured two women with a company truck.

In a 5-1 decision, the state high court said Florida Statute 733.710(1) extinguishes the claims of plaintiffs Samantha Tsuji and Crystal Williams because it clearly constitutes a two-year statute of repose, and neither of the two exceptions to the statute apply.

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The post You Have 2 Years To Sue Dead People, Fla. High Court Rules appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

“Barebone affirmative defenses have always been deficient,” he told the court.

To show the government’s apathetic response to the lawsuits, the plaintiffs pointed to its negligence defenses. The plaintiffs told the court these aren’t negligence cases; they’re cases based on statutory claims.

Civil procedure rules bar “formulaic, boilerplate defenses,” said attorney Zina Bash of Keller Postman LLC. She said the defenses are inefficient, immaterial and need “more precision.”

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