The baby was born with severe injuries, which we argued were due to asphyxiation caused by multiple acts of negligence and failures of care during labor and delivery. He will require life long around-the-clock care and will be unable to independently perform any of the activities of daily living.

The defense argued that the infant’s injuries were probably caused by factors unrelated to healthcare, possibly including poor nutrition (lack of food) and a blow to the mother’s abdomen during pregnancy.

The ECG was read by a cardiologist.  It revealed abnormalities in the patient’s heart consistent with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.  There is no evidence that the cardiologist reported his findings to the patient or anyone else.

The arthroscopic surgery took place six weeks later.  The anesthesiologist noted the abnormal ECG in his pre-op anesthesia evaluation, but there is no evidence that he informed the patient of the abnormality, discussed it with the surgeon, or that he took any other action in response to it.

The patient survived the surgery.  Over the next three months he was seen five times for follow-up from the surgery.  The surgeon “discharged” the patient from care and cleared him to return to work.  Three days later, he died.  The cause of death was the atherosclerotic disease that had been discovered by the ECG some three and a half months earlier.

The difficulty in this case was causation.  The question was whether treatment would have saved his life.  We worked with our experts and agreed that treatment would have made a difference.

This was an extremely difficult case.  The problem was establishing the reason why this happened and proving that it was preventable.  We spent endless hours researching and talking to experts about these procedures and the medications used in them.

Despite interventions (changes in maternal position, intravenous fluids, mask oxygen to the mom) to relieve the cord compression, the baby’s abnormal heart rate patterns persisted and then the heart rate slowed into a bradycardia.  The doctor was there, watching.

We contended that the doctor needed to order a C-section delivery, or at least take the mom to the operating room to prepare for emergent delivery if necessary.  Instead, the doctor and the nurses stood by and watched, apparently anticipating a spontaneous vaginal delivery.

With the baby still high in the pelvis, C-section became the only option for saving the baby from permanent injury.  After many crucial minutes went by and the doctor left the room to attend to an uncomplicated birth, she finally ordered a C-section and the baby was delivered.

But the C-section was too late.  Upon delivery, the baby, Elizabeth, showed no respiratory effort and required resuscitation.  She was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at approximately 18 months of age.   She will never be able to work and will require life-long attendant care.

Elizabeth was 12-years-old when we took the case.  Another Washington firm had turned down the case, probably because they were concerned that the limitations period had run.  We dug deeper into the facts and the applicable law.  We decided we could make an argument that the limitations period—usually three years from the date of the injury—had not run.

Within two weeks, Linda had neurosurgery to remove a very large frontal lobe meningioma.  (A meningioma is a type of benign tumor.)

The surgery took over nine hours.  But less than 24 hours later, the surgeon authorized Linda’s discharge from the ICU to the regular nursing floor.  Linda began “thrashing violently” in bed.  No one ordered any restraints, or even lowered the bed, and Linda was later found on the floor.  The surgeon was called.  She eventually came in to check on Linda and discovered that her brain was swelling dangerously.  Heroic measures followed, but several days later, Linda’s 18-year-old son had to make the decision to remove her  life support.

We sued both the hospital—which was responsible for the nursing care—and the surgeon.  Between them, we settled the case for $725,000.

We represented the boy’s mother.  He lived with his mother but his dad picked him up from school every day and took care of him until his mother got home from work.  His practice was to take the boy with him to work out at the fitness center which had no childcare facility.

The fitness center immediately closed, declaring bankruptcy soon after, not because of anything we did, but, apparently, because as soon as the news hit the papers, none of the members wanted to work out there anymore.  We investigated the dad, who had basically no assets.  He lived in a rental and had no applicable insurance.  The fitness center had a $1M insurance policy and that was all the money there was.

This case was particularly tricky due to the conflict between the mom and dad.   On the one side, the fitness center was wary of settling the claim with the mom for their full policy limit of $1 M while there was also a potential claim from the dad who wanted a piece of any settlement.  As you might expect, the emotions in the case ran extremely high and the dad was emotionally unprepared to accept any responsibility for the accident.

Our goal was to settle the case as fast as possible so that the mother didn’t have to deal with a drawn out process and to maximize her share of the limited settlement proceeds.  Less than four months after the boy died, we convinced the insurer to pay the mother its policy limits, then we went to mediation with the dad to determine his share.  We ultimately agreed to pay him about 20% of the net settlement.

In 1993, when he was in his 50s, the husband went to the gastroenterologist with the express goal of preventing colon cancer, which he told the doctor was prevalent in his family.  The gastroenterologist never took an adequate history and never understood the true extent of the colon cancer family history.  As a result, the doctor failed to consider and treat him as a high-risk patient.

The doctor performed three endoscopic examinations a couple of years apart but recommended no other care or treatments.  Almost exactly a year after the last endoscopic exam, the husband was diagnosed with a  4cm, obstructing colon tumor.  The cancer was terminal, it had spread throughout his abdominal cavity.

One of our attorneys, Kerry Kidman, dissected hundreds of articles written by the defense’s expert witness Dr. Rex and discovered logical disconnects between the findings and conclusions.  During his cross-examination, Kerry successfully proved that Dr. Rex’s conclusions were wrong.

The case was against a Kitsap County primary care doctor.  Our client, a 48-year-old man went to his doctor reporting persistent rectal bleeding.  The doctor performed a digital rectal exam, found no active bleeding, and diagnosed “slight internal based hemorrhoids.”

The doctor later performed a sigmoidoscopy—similar to a colonoscopy only more limited.  There were two areas in the sigmoid colon that the doctor was unable to visualize due to adhered stool.  He found no bleeding and was unable to identify the cause of our client’s earlier bleeding, so he continued to diagnose hemorrhoids.

Fourteen months after the sigmoidoscopy, our client went to Harrison Hospital where he was diagnosed with cancer that had metastasized to the lymph nodes.

We alleged that, given the inadequacy of the sigmoidoscopic exam and the continuing absence of an explanation for our client’s bleeding, a follow-up endoscopy procedure — preferably a colonoscopy, which is more sensitive than sigmoidoscopy — was necessary.

In Topham v. Shapiro, we represented a man severely injured from a toxic reaction to a yellow jacket sting. Mr. Topham’s doctor had told him he was not allergic to yellow jackets. His doctor reached this conclusion after she administered a commonly used skin test designed to test for insect sting allergy. The doctor, and most of the medical profession, considered the test to be nearly 100% effective in identifying patients who were allergic. The test came back negative. In reality, Mr. Topham was dangerously allergic to yellow jacket stings and, we argued, should have been offered venom immunotherapy treatment as a prophylaxis against an anaphylactic reaction should he be stung again.

About one year after the test clearing him, he was stung again and went into severe anaphylactic shock. We sued the manufacturer of the skin test. The evidence we produced at trial in King County Superior Court not only won the case, but fairly persuasively alerted allergists they can no longer rely on skin tests in diagnosing Hymenoptera (insect) allergy. Our lawsuit’s contribution was acknowledged in the editorial of the recent JOURNAL OF ALLERGY AND CLINICAL IMMUNOLOGY by one of the nation’s leading allergists. People who are at risk for life-threatening anaphylactic reactions and death from insect stings can now receive protective immunotherapy they would have been denied in the past had doctors continued to rely on the information given by this inadequate skin test.