Ask a Medical Malpractice (Defense) Lawyer

[TheRealJoeFish]

When defending the hospital/doctors/staff, do you team up with the med mal insurance entities?

The short answer is yes.  By way of further explanation, for most of the process, the insurance company does their thing, and the attorneys do their thing, and there's not a ton of interaction between the two.  But if the case gets into settlement discussions, there's a ton of interaction, going back and forth discussing the value of the case and what would be a good settlement and what would be a not-great-but-palatable settlement and what would be the risk/reward of settling for x vs going to trial and such.  An additional factor - one that I don't need to directly worry about, because my firm represents hospitals and nurses primarily rather than individual doctors - is that, even if the attorney and the insurance company agree that settlement is ideal, the doctor gets final say, and can absolutely refuse to settle (this is different from, say, a car crash, in which the insurance company is essentially the boss).  A not-insignificant part of being a trial lawyer, on either side of the case, is explaining to your client why it's a good idea to settle in a given situation.  It's not a zero-sum game; if you settle early on, even if the number is worse than you'd expect a jury to give you, you're saving yourself both the tremendous expenses of trying a medical malpractice case to verdict as well as the uncertainty surrounding the decision of twelve people who are locked in a room and told to stay there until they agree on something.