plaintiffs lawyers

ProPublica reports on a little-covered problem: some people harmed by medical malpractice can't find any attorneys to take their cases.

This is a phenomenon that many plaintiffs lawyers told me about when I was regularly reporting on medical-malpractice litigation for The Legal Intelligencer. Med mal cases are very expensive to work up because they require expert witnesses and scientific-oriented discovery, and many firms will not take cases in which the injury is less catastrophic or their are low economic damages because the return on investing in the case is so low.

ProPublica reports on the "problem faced by many who are harmed in a medical setting: Attorneys refuse their cases, not because the harm didn’t happen but because the potential economic damages are too low." This includes the elderly who have low incomes because they are retired, because their medical bills are picked up by Medicare and they typically have no dependents, ProPublica further reports.

A plaintiff's lawyer argues that there was no protection for his client, who worked for an American Indian casino, from allegedly being "repeatedly subjected to offensive and explicit conduct based on race, sex and national origin, including being  'dry humped' by his supervisor, having KKK photos emailed to him, being called a Nazi, being given the 'Heil Hitler' salute, having to hear about his supervisor’s sexual acts and hearing customers being racially denigrated," according to this piece in the San Francisco Examiner. Any sovereign nation sets its own rules on what protection should be given from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability and other characteristics, and the attorney argues against "using the concept of national sovereignty to deny people their basic rights to safety and fair treatment. Ironically, Native Americans, themselves the subject of genocide and centuries of state-sponsored discrimination and civil-rights abuse, exempt themselves from adhering to any legal protections against discrimination and harassment on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, etc."