Category Archives: Florida

On June 8, in North Broward Hospital District v. Kalitan, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that caps on noneconomic damages (pain and suffering) in medical malpractice lawsuits violated the equal protection clause. Mostly, the court said that the caps did not pass the “rational basis test,” where a challenged law must be rationally related to a legitimate government interest. By deciding the Legislature had no rational basis for imposing the caps, the court crowned itself fact-finder and policymaker, rejecting all of the Legislature’s work and its role under our system of government. Under the rational basis test, the court is supposed to defer to the Legislature if there is any “rational basis” in the record. Here, the court found there was no conceivable rational basis for the Legislature’s action. Let’s take a look at the record. In 2002, the Governor’s Select Task Force on Healthcare Professional Liability Insurance spent months traveling around the state, listening to all interested parties, gathering relevant data, and analyzing trends. What they observed and documented was alarming: In 2002, the average liability premium per doctor in Florida was 55 percent higher than the national average. For the period from 1996 to 2002, average insurance premiums in Florida…

A newly released report by the American Tort Reform Association finds that residents of the Sunshine State are living in a very warm place indeed. The 2016-2017 Judicial Hellholes rankings are out, and Florida came in at an ignoble 4th.  Florida follows St. Louis, Missouri; California; and New York City Asbestos Litigation as home to the most unfair civil courts in the nation. The report specifically singles out the Florida Supreme Court for what ATRA president Tiger Joyce called in a statement accompanying the report “liability-expanding decisions that ignore state lawmakers’ prerogatives and motivate South Florida’s plaintiffs’ bar to become even more aggressive.” One area of focus is the Florida Supreme Court’s rulings on workers’ compensation cases.   In the April decision for Castellanos v. Next Door Co., the court made it possible for plaintiffs’ lawyers to collect large fees for filing relatively small worker’s comp claims.  The Florida Supreme Court’s ruling overthrew the legislature’s previous efforts at normalizing fee structures. “No state high court in recent years has been more brazenly inclined to disregard the will of the legislative and executive branches of the government, and thus disregard the will of the voters who elect those lawmakers, than has the…

A medical liability case, even if successful, can cause financial, emotional and reputational harm to a physician—and also to the patient who brings the suit. A 2013 amendment to the Florida Medical Liability Act, which requires the plaintiff to release relevant health information to determine whether a claim for medical liability is meritorious, is under threat in the Florida Supreme Court. At stake in Weaver v. Myers is whether the Florida Medical Malpractice Act, which requires the plaintiff to authorize the release of otherwise confidential health information as a condition of bringing a lawsuit for medical liability, is valid. Both a trial court and the Florida First District Court of Appeals confirmed the amendment’s validity. Florida’s pre-suit investigation process was intended to allow both claimants and potential defendants the opportunity to determine whether a medical liability claim has merit and to encourage early resolution of claims between the parties. This process can avoid costly and time-consuming proceedings through a less complicated pre-suit process that allows both parties to examine the evidence. What happened Emma Weaver, widow and representative of Thomas C. Weaver, sued her late husband’s physician, Stephen C. Myers, MD, for medical liability. However, she did not want to…