March 28, 2024

Medical Malpractice

One for the Record Books

$217-million verdict aside, most med-mal cases are unsuccessful, says one expert.

Cynthia Barnett | 12/1/2006

Tampa trial lawyer Steve Yerrid with Allan Navarro. The Navarro family and Yerrid's legal team plan to donate punitive damages to charity.

Tort-reform advocates are aghast over a Tampa jury's recent $217-million medical malpractice verdict, the largest ever in Florida and third-largest in the United States, according to Bloomberg data. One doc-blogger called the verdict a "jackpot" for Tampa trial lawyer Steve Yerrid, best known as part of the legal team that brought Florida's landmark case against U.S. tobacco companies in the 1990s.

The plaintiff, 50-year-old Allan Navarro, walked into the emergency room at University Community Hospital Carrollwood six years ago complaining of severe nausea, dizziness and headache. He was having a stroke. An unlicensed physician's assistant misdiagnosed a sinus infection, and the attending physician based his diagnosis on that. Navarro was sent home. He went into a coma that lasted three months. He woke up severely and permanently disabled.

Yerrid sued the physicians groups that provided ER service at the hospital; the hospital was not sued. He says the groups' insurer, ProNational, refused his $2-million settlement offer. Instead, he says the company offered $300 -- $100 each for Navarro, his wife and his 10-year-old son.

Following the three-week civil trial, the jury in October awarded Navarro and his family $116.7 million in compensatory damages and $100.1 million in punitive damages. Yerrid says the case was so egregious that it should have been used as an argument against caps on damages, rather than for them. The physician assistant had failed his license exam four times. His time was billed at a doctor's rate. Navarro wrote on his medical forms that there was a history of stroke in his family. "This could have been any family," says Yerrid. "Anyone who would hold this up as an outrageous damage award was not in that courtroom."

In the end, the large award isn't likely to make good ammunition for either the tort reformers or the trial lawyers, says Lyrissa Lidsky, a tort law expert at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law. Medical malpractice cases remain exceedingly difficult to win. Most, Lidsky says, are not successful. "It's not true that juries want to slam doctors -- juries as a whole are very sympathetic to the pressures faced by physicians," says Lidsky. Likewise, the greedy trial lawyer picture is passé: "I think lawyers turn down the vast majority of medical malpractice cases that come their way because they are so difficult to win," she says. "They seem to be taking the cases with incredibly severe injuries and pretty egregious misconduct."

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