Northwestern > Chicago ainec imo

I wish they could tabulate something like number of graduates in big law within five years of graduation. Or number in full time faculty positions or biglaw or clerkships. Would be much more interesting.

I have a phone interview for an attorney position with a hospital in town. The interview is with the hospital's recruiter. Does anyone have experience with this? I'm wondering what to expect. I imagine that since I'm interviewing with their recruiter first, that the interview will be more general but I really don't know.

MJW sighting!

You can no longer sue a Worker's Compensation carrier for Bad Faith.

Thanks, Texas Supreme Court. They should call Bad Faith "lying, cheating and stealing" so You can no longer sue a Worker's Compensation carrier for lying, cheating, and stealing.

I hear they are looking for a new State Senator from your district. I think you would be great for the job. Go for it kiddo.

Texas is the nut low for any type of personal injury/comp work. I'm not sure how people survive down there with their fair and balanced "tort reform."

Paid or incurred is starting to kick our ass. (bills written off by health insurance contracts can't be shown to jury). Almost all of my offers on clear liability cases are the meds or just a little worse. It sucks. I still think if we try enough cases and kick their asses enough, they will start paying again. The only problem is that our supreme court is apparently literally insane. Although I did get the "policy limits" call today on a case which is always nice.

Comp is non existent anymore for attorneys. We have a guy on comp right now with a 3 level fusion and he is "12%" impaired. 10% for one fusion, and 1% for each additional one. He does this for a living: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A_h2AjJaMw SO GET BACK TO WORK FREELOADER

lol. when i see stuff like this, i kind of think about it. One of the defense lawyers on my case is a state rep...and apparently was a big deal on the loser pays thing. He's actually a very reasonable guy to deal with in terms of the case we have together, but I gave him a lot of **** for it.

Can those of us who don't know much about PI get an explanation of all this (and why you're upset) in layman's terms?

Also, that video is nuts. Seriously don't understand why they don't wear a parachute.

Paid/Incurred: When an injured person goes to the doctor/hospital/er, they almost always fund the treatment with health insurance, cash, or letters of protection (provider agrees to get paid out of settlement/judgment if any). In the past, whatever the amount the provider charged is shown to the jury and is evidence. Now, thanks to our terrible supreme court, we can only show amounts paid or owed. A good example is if someone gets an MRI and pays cash, it can cost $2,500 to $3,500. If they use health insurance, the health insurance has a deal with the provider and might only pay them $1,000. At trial, we can only show $1,000.

The worst case is "charity". If I have a client with a $40,000 medical bill due to a severe injury, and they obviously can't pay it, the hospital might write off 35k as "charity", leaving me a $5,000 injury to show the jury. Sometimes 100k plus surgeries are 10-15k after writeoffs. It isn't fair to the Plaintiff's for two reasons: 1. Defendants benefit from the Plaintiffs health insurance (it clearly violates the collateral source rule too, btw) 2. juries often look at the amount of medical bills as a measure of the severity of the injury. Essentially, you are punished for having health insurance and you are better off going to see some shady chiropractor and not pay for it.

As for the impairment rating, it's a little bit foreign to me b/c attorney's have been run out of worker's comp in texas. But basically, once you reach max medical improvement, you get 3x your impairment rating in weeks of benefits. So the 12% guy gets 36 weeks of comp even though he will probably never work again. And theoretically, his comp carrier can just say his fusion was a result of aids he contracted from aliens and refuse to pay him with little recourse thanks to yesterday's ruling.

It ain't serious until the claim is over a million.


But that sounds really ****ty for workers in Texas.

I don't get it. Are you saying the Plaintiff should collect a profit if his insurance covers part of the cost?

Not really arguing with you but just want to see your answer. So I get the reason for showing the jury the full amount for injury impact reasons and all that. But isn't it more accurate to say you're only entitled to compensation for what you actually paid? I mean assuming the hospital is cool with it, and there's no issue with them. If ultimately you only paid $5k for the surgery, why are you entitled to more than $5k? I don't see why it matters what the hospital was going to charge you originally. They almost always do that anyway, have a rate that the fish pay and then have negotiated rates with insurance all that that most people pay.

Also, does anyone ever work out a deal with the hospital where the hospital agrees to charge $5k now and suspend collection of $35k pending the outcome of litigation or something like that. That way you could join them as a party of interest, or at the very least say no I really owe $35k, I just haven't paid them yet. Doesn't that get you around this issue?

Four things:

1.My problem with it is that the writeoffs are something that you've paid for by paying premiums for years. You didn't buy health insurance so that a Defendant doesn't have to pay as much for your bill after you get injured. You bought it so that you will be covered.

2. The Defendant has committed a wrong and they have to pay X for it. X, in my opinion, should be the amount of overall damage the Defendant caused to the other person, i.e. not the amount of damage caused - the amount that the Plaintiff wisely protected himself from. It's kind of like the Defendant arguing, "yeah well he has a rich uncle who paid for his medical bills." I know you called it the rate the "fish have to pay", but as we all know from the poker world, that's the vast majority of people. Also, the system rewards the incompetents and punishes those who have done it the right way.


3. This is a little bit of a sidebar: The collateral source rule still applies. You can't mention these writeoffs in trial or the whole health insurance debate thing. In fact, You can't mention insurance at all. So the jury is just confused. We once had a trial against State Farm (direct action against Plaintiff's own ins. company for his underinsured benefits)...literally State Farm was the named Defendant, and we were ordered not to mention insurance. The jury could not for the life of them figure out why State Farm was the Defendant and we were proving that some other random person was at fault. They asked multiple times during voire dire and during deliberations and the judge was just like "don't worry about it".

4. On that same note, we are (understandably) not allowed to mention that the Defendant has insurance (and that's who the lawyer works for, really). So why do they get to use our health insurance to their benefit? It's hypocritical.

I've never seen this happen, although it's a very new law and people are still trying to figure out how to approach it. Just off the top of my head, I would say there is a pretty significant disconnect between hospitals and the legal system and I'd bet I'd have a really hard time convincing a hospital to partner up with me like this. The best even the proactive hospitals do is file a lien on the case and treat me basically like an adversary. I did have one hospital the other day charge a writeoff amount to the patient...I settled the case based off of that charge (crappyish settlement pushed by the client)...then they came back and said she owed the whole thing.

One thing I've considered is in the more serious cases, have the doctor or some other expert come in and testify about how much surgery costs, just to make sure the jury knows that a fusion can be a ~$110k+ surgery that really screws you up, and not a 5k inpatient inconvenience. My boss has actually shows a video of the surgery because he does crazy stuff like that, but that can easily backfire as being over the top and off putting.