July 6th, 2023

Surgery is not Spoliation – Again

If was a dumb argument when I first heard about it: That a defendant in a personal injury case had a right to “independent medical exams” of the bodies of injured plaintiffs before they were operated on. And if they didn’t get it, they demanded a sanction for “spoliation” of the evidence — the evidence being the body of the injured person.

Back in late 2021, that argument was dumped on its head by the Appellate Division (First Department), as was the argument that the defense medical exam was somehow independent (The “Independent” Medical Exam is Dead).

And now the Second Department has likewise dumped on the idea, citing to the First Department’s holding in Gilliam v. UNC Holdings:

While the Court ignored the issue of calling such an exam “independent,” it unequivocally held that injured plaintiffs had every right to undergo surgery without first giving defendants access to their bodies for an exam. Citing from the First Department holding in Gilliam, that Court said that the:

“state of one’s body is fundamentally different from inanimate evidence, and medical treatment, including surgery, is entirely distinct from the destruction of documents or tangible evidence which spoliation sanctions attempt to ameliorate. To find that a person has an ‘obligation,’ to preserve his or her body in an injured state so that a defendant may conduct [a medical examination], is antithetical to our belief in personal liberty and control over our own bodies”

…
“[p]laintiffs must be free to determine when to undergo medical treatments based on personal factors such as doctor’s advice and their specific pain and discomfort level. It would be absurd for courts to require a plaintiff to forgo surgery (or other medical treatment) for an injury so as not to potentially compromise a lawsuit against the party(s) alleged to have caused the injury”

And with these following words, the Second Department, joining the First, which will hopefully put a final nail in this stupidity:

It is not reasonable to require a plaintiff to delay medical treatment, and potentially prolong his or her suffering, solely to allow a defendant to examine the plaintiff’s body in a presurgical state. Under these circumstances, the plaintiff has not “refuse[d] to obey an order for disclosure or wilfully fail[ed] to disclose information which . . . ought to have been disclosed”

The case is Fandeau v. Corona Industries, decided June 28th.

December 13th, 2021

The “Independent” Medical Exam is Dead

This post is a two-parter and I struggle to figure out which part is more important. First, an appellate court in New York has finally stuck a fork in the “independent” medical exam. It is dead and gone.

Second, the same court in the same decision has stated that the human body is not capable of spoliation. I’ll deal with that quirky part first (though each is worthy of a separate post).

It’s been a recent trend by some defense lawyers to claim that a personal injury plaintiff could not get surgery to fix their condition. Unless it was an emergency. They had to first give defendants a chance to have the person examined before the plaintiff’s body was changed, or in the words of the law, “spoliated.” And if there is spoliation, then sanctions can be imposed.

And some lower courts bought that argument.

But in Gilliam v.UNI Holdings, a unanimous panel of the Appellate Division (First Department) said no way, you can’t give spoliation sanctions for people getting their bodies fixed after the defendants broke them:

We now reverse and hold that the condition of one’s body is not the type of evidence that is subject to a spoliation analysis. And, to the extent that these lower court decisions hold that spoliation analysis encompasses the condition of one’s body, they should not be followed… To so hold would improperly subject a plaintiff’s health condition to an unsuitable legal analysis. Instead, a failure to appear for an ME, regardless of whether the failure to appear is preceded by medical treatment for the condition at issue, should be analyzed the same as other failures to comply with court-ordered discovery.

Did you see that “ME” in there? That stands for medical exam. I’ll get to that part in a minute.

But first, as rationale for why you can’t “spoliate” the human body the way you could with the destruction of documents, devices, electronic evidence and a wide variety of equipment ranging from treadmills to chairs, the court held:

The state of one’s body is fundamentally different from inanimate evidence, and medical treatment, including surgery, is entirely distinct from the destruction of documents or tangible evidence which spoliation sanctions attempt to ameliorate. To find that a person has an “obligation,” to preserve his or her body in an injured state so that a defendant may conduct an ME, is antithetical to our belief in personal liberty and control over our own bodies.

People should not be forced into the “absurd” situation of being forced to forego surgery to heal themselves because a lawsuit is pending, says the court:

Plaintiffs must be free to determine when to undergo medical treatments based on personal factors such as doctor’s advice and their specific pain and discomfort level. It would be absurd for courts to require a plaintiff to forego surgery (or other medical treatment) for an injury so as not to potentially compromise a lawsuit against the party(s) alleged to have caused the injury.

Now on to that part about the “ME.” For as long as I have practiced law — and I am coming up on 36 years since I was admitted to the bar — defense lawyers and the courts have insisted on using the phrase “independent” medical exams (IME) to refer to exams that defendants were entitled to in order to assess the damage to the human body or mind after a collision or other mishap. When you place your body in issue in a lawsuit, after all, you waive any confidentiality for those particular body parts and the defendants are entitled to have a doctor examine those parts.

But it was never independent. We all knew this. These were not, after all, doctors hired by the courts. They were hired by the defendants as part of litigation.

Back in 2013 I did a series of posts on Quickie Medical Exams that last, often, no more than a few minutes at most so that a doctor could testify that the injured plaintiff wasn’t really hurt, or had fully recovered. It was, and often continues in my opinion to be, a flat out scam and form of insurance fraud (one that favors the insurance company).

Routinely over the years I have struck the word “independent” from the forms for routine discovery orders, insisting they be called Defense Medical Exams or Medical-Legal Exams. I first wrote about this in 2009 (2009!) when I asked Is the “Independent” Medical Exam Dead?

I wrote it because of a dissenting opinion from this same court, the First Department, where Justice McKeon asked a question that former Chief Judge Lippman had already asked (also in dissent):

…the “independent” prong of the term, has long been winked at by the bench and bar. Few consider the physical examination conducted for purposes of litigation as independent; indeed, one court has described it as part of the “adversarial process” (Bazakos v Lewis, rev’d on other grounds) with Chief Judge Lippman forthrightly observing that “[t]hese exams, far from being independent in any ordinary sense of the word, are paid for and frequently controlled in their scope and conduct by legal adversaries of the examinee (id. at 6 [Lippman, Ch. J., dissenting).

At that time I prognosticated:

So let me be the first to proclaim that the “independent” medical exam is dead. Sure, it may still take a few years to see it buried altogether, but make no mistake about it, it is on an irreversible course to the trash heap of litigation history.

And now it is dead. For reals. There is no longer a question mark on the issue, at least in the First Department (New York and Bronx counties). It seems unlikely that any other appellate department would continue to claim such exams are “independent.” The dissents of Lippman and McKeon have won the day. The First Department now says:

It should also be noted that defendant has mischaracterized the nature and role of “independent” MEs in personal injury litigation, presumably to cast plaintiff’s surgery as an egregious and sanctionable act. Such examinations “far from being independent in any ordinary sense of the word, are paid for and frequently controlled in their scope and conduct by legal adversaries of the examinee. They are emphatically not occasions for treatment, but are most often utilized to contest the examinee’s claimed injury and to dispute the need for any treatment at all” (Bazakos v Lewis, 12 NY3d 631, 638 [2009] [Lipman, Ch. J., dissenting]). Viewed in this context, an ME is simply one piece of evidence in a personal injury action.

So the Gilliam case addresses two significant issues. The first is somewhat limited and a little bit quirky — the issue of spoliation of the human body.

But the second is significant to all personal injury actions where the plaintiffs are examined. No more should a court refer to these exams — either in decisions or in front of jurors — as independent.

They aren’t. And they never were. And we should no longer be asking if the “independent” medical exam is dead. It is. Good riddance.

April 30th, 2019

Covering Up the “Accident”: Cops and Pols Edition

Mayor de Blasio emerges from a car. Source: Daily News

I knew I’d seen this act before. A routine car collision gets covered up. Why? Because a politician was in the car.

When I first wrote about it 10 years ago it was Jeanine Pirro in the back seat with her then-husband Al Pirro. Their vehicle, owned by Al, sideswiped a motorcycle and the rider was injured.

After seeing who was in the car, the original accident report (more properly called a collision report) was deep-sixed and the Pirro vehicle magically disappeared from the second accident report. The cops called the Harley rider a fraud and listed it as a one-vehicle accident.

Except that someone already had a copy of that first report, and the cops were caught covering up the crash.

Fast forward to this week, and it is Mayor de Blasio in the car with his wife that is involved in a collision, and the story hits the Daily News — four years after it happened.

Apparently, a car veered into his lane and hit the mayoral SUV. I say apparently because that was the lede in the story:

On a Saturday morning in August 2015, Mayor de Blasio was in the back seat of a black NYPD Chevy Tahoe bound for an event in Harlem when a driver changing lanes slammed into his ride.No one was hurt. No big deal, right?

Except that the police decided to cover it up. Instinct perhaps?

Back to the story:

No one was hurt, but the commanding officer of the mayor’s executive protection unit, Howard Redmond, was furious. Text messages obtained by the Daily News show he immediately ordered the incident be covered up to protect de Blasio’s image.

“As per CO [the commanding officer] no one is to know about this,” Sgt. Jerry Ioveno texted members of the unit, referring to Redmond. “Not even the other teams.”

“No one is to know,” he repeated.

Why this would reflect badly on the Mayor is beyond me, even if the Mayor’s driver was at fault. He, after all, was a passenger.

But the NYPD was worried about optics. If there are bad optics, then yeah, maybe it does reflect badly. On the NYPD. And its driver. If the NYPD driver was actually the one at fault.

But the story just gets weirder:

Redmond allegedly ordered that the cop behind the wheel, Detective Edgar Robles, be officially listed as the driver of a backup SUV, text messages show. That way, the unit could more plausibly claim the mayor wasn’t in the vehicle involved in the collision, a source close to the executive protection unit said.

Then, buried down further in the article, it hits: It was the NYPD at fault. Not the other driver:

NYPD spokesman Phil Walzak told The News that the NYPD investigated the accident involving de Blasio’s SUV “and determined the NYPD was at fault. Far from a coverup, this in fact shows the exact opposite – the NYPD took this incident seriously.”

The text messages are almost comical in their ham-handed way of covering up the crash — successfully for years. Some of the texts:

“Is Eagle p—-d?” Ioveno asked in a text message, using de Blasio’s code name.
“Not really,” a detective wrote.
“Redmond hell-bent that this doesn’t get out to anyone, we need to kill the story,” executive protection unit cop Jorge Bravo wrote.
“He went off on OPTICS of this detail – the little things (double-parking and crosswalk s–t),” Bravo added…
“No one is to know; also, Eagle was not in the limo … are we clear guys please?” Ioveno said, using the code word limo for the NYPD Chevy Tahoe.

And then came a second crash, this one involving city First Lady Chirlane McCray, multiple vehicles and disappearing witnesses. And in this crash, someone was hurt.

The NYPD went all in, it seems, on trying to cover this one up also. As per one of the attorneys involved:

“The way the police report is written, you can kind of tell they’re covering something up,” Grossman said. “If you see the diagram — it doesn’t make sense. … They seemed to whisk everybody away without anybody saying anything.”

And so it goes. Negligence happens and those who are supposed to document what happens decide to come up with “alternative facts” and hide the witnesses so that innocent victims are frustrated in their ability to find out what actually happened.

The more the world changes, the more it stays the same. Except that sometimes emails and texts help with the Big Reveal.

April 9th, 2014

A $9 Billion Punitive Damages Verdict in Actos Drug Trial (How much is too much?)

We once again see a whopping punitive damages verdict and need to discuss: Just how much is too much? For the reasons that follow, I think that a ratio of punitive:compensatory damages of 100:1 or greater are sustainable based on current opinions from the Supreme Court.

At issue for the moment is a $9 Billion punitive damage award against Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical and Eli Lilly this week. The case concerned the diabetes drug Actos, and the manufacturer’s failure to warn that it increases the chances of bladder cancer. There was also a $1.5M compensatory damage award.

The punitive award spanking was no doubt influenced by the defendants’ destruction of documents. Juries tend to hate it when people destroy important documents.

It isn’t my objective to analyze the details of the trial, which I did not follow, only to go back and try to forecast what the judge might do with the punitive damage award, and more importantly, what the appellate judges will do if the matter doesn’t settle.

But there really isn’t a straight answer. In the most significant Supreme Court ruling on the subject, State Farm v. Campbell, the majority opinion by Justice Kennedy gave three conflicting statements on the subject. He cited first, for instance, to the older case of BMW v. Gore, that:

[W]e concluded that an award of more than four times the amount of compensatory damages might be close to the line of constitutional impropriety.

For reference, BMW v.Gore dealt with punitive damages against a car dealer that repainted a new car that had been damaged, but had failed to disclose it. The verdict was $4,000 in compensatory damages. But the jury also awarded $4,000,000 in punitive damages as it was the policy of BMW to do this.

For this purely commercial transaction, the Supreme Court felt that due process was not served by such a large award, as the defendant didn’t have notice of this potentiality. And with that, the court established three guideposts to determine if a punitive award was constitutional or not:

The degree of reprehensibility of the conduct;
The ratio between punitive award and plaintiff’s actual harm, and
The legislative sanctions provided for comparable misconduct.

Now lets return to the court’s State Farm decision, because, as I noted before, there were three seemingly contradictory statements. Having first quoted the 4x amount as being reasonable, Justice Kennedy then went on to write:

[F]ew awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages will satisfy due process.

So now Kennedy is at at a 9:1 ratio. But just as Gore was a commercial transaction, so too was State Farm v. Campbell. In that case Campbell caused a terrible auto collision, and State Farm acted in bad faith in defending its insured. At issue was not the personal injuries of the victims, but the contract between State Farm and Campbell.

Perhaps, since a physical injury was not truly at stake in State Farm, or perhaps just to cobble together a majority, Justice Kennedy then went on to make a third comment on the permissible extent of a punitive damage award, knocking out both the 4x and 9x ratios he had previously described:

Nonetheless, because there are no rigid benchmarks that a punitive damages award may not surpass, ratios greater than those we have previously upheld may comport with due process where “a particularly egregious act has resulted in only a small amount of economic damages.”

Following State Farm, it had become accepted wisdom among many that the Supreme Court would only allow a single digit multiplier, notwithstanding that last quote, or perhaps a bigger multiplier in only the smallest of cases.

But I never believed that the “single-digit ratio” was a real line in the sand. One reason is that the Supremes eventually let stand a 97:1 ratio in Philip Morris v. Williams, a cigarette case with an $821,000 compensatory award and a 97.5M punitive award that went up to the Supreme Court on multiple occasions.

Now some would argue that letting something stand without deciding the issue (SCOTUS granted cert on the case’s third and final trip to the high court and then later dismissed it as improvidently taken) is not the same as affirming a lower court decision.

But here is something else: That 9:1 ratio nonsense from State Farm is confirmed as nonsense by looking at the conduct of two members of the 6-3 State Farm “single-digit” majority. First, a review of the oral argument the second time Philip Morris v. Williams came before SCOTUS (p. 30, line 5) finds this statement by Justice Breyer:

…the more severely awful the conduct, the higher the ratio between the damage award and the injury suffered by this victim in court. And if it’s really bad, you’re going to maybe have a hundred times this compensation instead of only ten times or five times. So — we take it into account, the extent of the harm that could be suffered, in deciding what that ratio should be. That means it goes to the evilness of the conduct.

So Justice Breyer seems not to think too much of that 9x single-digit formulation.

And then there is Justice Stevens, also in the 6-3 State Farm majority. When SCOTUS sent Philip Morris back to Oregon for a redetermination of punitive damages based on jury instructions, Justice Stevens dissented. He was also OK letting that 97:1 ratio stand.

Since both Stevens and Breyer were part of the 6-3 State Farm majority, it is clear that there was most definitely not a majority of justices willing to stick to single digit multipliers for a personal injury case.

So what will happen in the Actos litigation? I think that a punitive damage award of 100x or greater is in the cards if the plaintiffs satisfy the court that the conduct was reprehensible (the second guidepost in the BMW v. Gore). And I also think, given the significant document destruction that led to that whopper of an award, that satisfying that element won’t be too difficult.

Assuming that the $1.5M in compensatory damages aren’t touched, I think that ultimately a punitive award of $150M+ is sustainable under current law.

Allen v. Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America Inc., 12-cv-00064.

December 3rd, 2012

Spoliation of Evidence, in the News

OK, which wise guy messed with the evidence?

Two cases in two different New York courts hit the same topic this past week: The evidence had been lost or destroyed. But if you thought that a couple hundred years of jurisprudence would have long resolved and standardized how these things are handled, you would be mistaken.

Case 1 takes place in federal court, where a musician used YouTube to offer up a $1M reward for his lost/stolen laptop. The artist, Ryan Leslie, claimed it had valuable intellectual property on it, that being unreleased songs, and he was desperate for its return. And he got the laptop back.

But despite getting it back, Leslie didn’t want to pay, claiming that the hard drive was damaged and the intellectual property that was on it couldn’t be accessed.

But he had an even bigger problem then wrestling with his attempt to renege on his promise. And that problem was that he gave the laptop to the manufacturer to obtain the information, and the manufacturer then wiped the hard drive clean. Oops. Was the information actually there or not?

This is the crux of the legal argument, as quoted from the decision:

A party has an obligation to preserve evidence when “the party has notice that the evidence is relevant to litigation or when a party should have known that the evidence may be relevant to future litigation.”

Leslie was on notice that the information on the hard drive may be relevant to future litigation and, as a result, had an obligation to preserve that information.

So what is the standard in federal court for a sanction against the party that loses or destroys the evidence? Is it intentional destruction of evidence? Bad faith? Mere negligence? In the Second Circuit, the answer is, “it depends.” Decisions are made on a case by case basis according to the Second Circuit. And in this case, trial judge Judge Harold Baer found that because “the hard drive was destroyed when litigation was all but certain, I find that Leslie and his team were at least negligent in their handling of the hard drive.”

While the judge was asked by the plaintiff to grant summary judgment — an automatic win without a trial — he opted instead to give an adverse inference to the jury. They would be told, as a matter of law, that Leslie had possession of the hard drive and could assume litigation would follow based on the facts. The jury could, in other words, assume the worst.

And with that, the jury came back a few days ago with a $1M verdict.

Switch now to case 2, this time in state court. In Staten Island, a medical malpractice case is being waged over administration of the drug Plavix. The problem? Staten Island University Hospital has lost (or deep-sixed?) the critical “Medication Discharge Reconciliation Form” that would contain the information that was needed. As per Judge Joseph Maltese, sitting in the trial court:

[O]ut of the entire medical record concerning the plaintiff, the June 21, 2011 “Medication Discharge Reconciliation Form” is missing.

Oops, again. But while the standard may be loose in federal court as to what to do in this situation (the discretionary case-by-case basis described above) it is not in state court. Judge Maltese pointed out that the hospital knocked itself out with a single punch:

“It is well settled that when a party negligently loses or intentionally destroys key evidence, thereby depriving the non-responsible party from being able to prove its claim or defense, the responsible party may be sanctioned by the striking of its pleading.” Here, the crux of the plaintiff’s case is the defendant hospital’s failure to prescribe the proper medication upon her release on June 21, 2011. While this court is sympathetic to the defendant hospital’s contention that it has diligently searched for the record, it does not change the fact that after nearly a year of searching it has not been found. Staten Island University Hospital has been negligent in maintaining the plaintiff’s file, which it had a duty to maintain for six years from the date of discharge.

For the non-lawyers in the crowd, striking a pleading means an automatic win. It’s what the plaintiff wanted in the laptop case, but the judge declined to give opting for a lesser sanction.

Two different cases on spoliation, one state, one federal. The results are the same (plaintiff wins). But the way each one got there is different (one case given to the jury with a negative inference and the other taken out of the jury’s hands and decided as a matter of law).

Hey, I found it interesting. Your mileage may vary.