The Lighter Side of Health Law – July 2023

AHLA's monthly podcast featuring health lawyer and blogger Norm Tabler's informative and entertaining take on recent health law and other legal developments. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

This episode of ala Speaking of Health Law is brought to you by ALA members and donors like you. For more information, visit american health law.org.

Speaker 2: 0:22

Hi, I'm Norm Taber with this month's edition of the Lighter Side of Health Law, charging an arm and a leg, you could charge Cedric Lodge , an arm and a leg, and he could pay it literally, at least that's what the federal indictment against him says. Cedric was the manager of Harvard Medical School's morgue, which is pretty handy considering his side business selling body parts, and he had a pretty big inventory. Considering how many cadavers have been donated to Harvard's Anatomical Gifts program for research and training, the feds say that for the past five years, Cedric has been stealing body parts and taking them home, where wife Denise sells them through texts and social media. One regular customer, Katrina McClean resells the parts through a business called Cats creepy creations. Seriously, sometimes Katrina would visit them morgue to pick and choose among the various body parts. You can't make this stuff up. The case is US versus Lodge Middle District, Pennsylvania. Bedside Manor counts. When Durango Colorado's Mercy Hospital fired urologist, Dr. CJ Quail, she sued alleging she was fired because she's a woman. Mercy responded that it wasn't because she's a woman, it's because of her unprofessional behavior toward patients and Staff. Mercy cited some representative examples. On one occasion, she got mad at a tech and screamed that she was going to effing kill someone and quote , slap the terrified tech . Another time when she was inserting a catheter in a cancer patient visibly in pain, she told him, quote , you should have taken responsibility for your health. That's why you're in this situation. When the patient asked her to answer some further questions, she refused calling the patient a rectum only. She didn't use the word rectum and she shrieked. I don't have time for this effing patient. Well, strange as it sounds, the 10th circuit sided with Mercy ruling that the hospital fired her because she had a horrible bedside manner , which is a perfectly legal reason. The case is quail versus Catholic Health Initiatives 10th Circuit when a picture is worth $82,000. If you plan to text anyone in Canada, you may want to take a look at a recent decision by the King's Bench Court in Saskatchewan. The court held that when Farmer Chris Etcher texted a thumbs up emoji to a grain buyer, it was an enforceable acceptance of the contract proposed by the buyer. That meant that farmer Kris owed the buyer a cool 82,000 Canadian dollars in damages. Farmer, Chris insisted that the thumbs up simply meant that he had received the proposed contract, not that he had accepted it or even read it, but the judge noted that in the past, farmer Chris had used the thumbs up to indicate acceptance of terms proposed by that same buyer. So the next time you find yourself texting about business matters, remember to treat the thumbs up emoji as carefully as your signature stamp. The case is Southwest Terminal versus Acher, too good to be true. I hope that Michael Menon Robinson Law Firm had not already spent the 1.7 million in an attorney's fees. The district court awarded it for representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Nastar streaming service. Why? Because the Ninth Circuit struck it down as excessive, so excessive that in the court's words, it would likely make the average person shake her head in disbelief. How excessive Try 32 times as large as the $53,000 recovered for the plaintiffs. The law firm's position was that the award should reflect the amount of a fund set up for class members who may submit claims. But the Ninth Circuit said the fee should reflect only what the law firm's clients took home. The case of the hardworking c e o Info Trend , a Maryland data management company lost out on a 50 million N NIH contract, and it might have been because its c e o works too hard. You decide. On March 28, HHS emailed Info Trend , the bad news that its bid had not made the cut to go onto the next round. Info trend had 10 days to protest. HHS rejected the protest as too late. The company argued that the 10 days should start on March 29th because the March 28th email arrived after hours. That would be true ruled h h s and the gao . But your c e O was working late on March 28, and he opened the email that evening giving your company actual notice on the 28th. Your protest was a day late and 50 million short. So there you have it. The company lost the right to protest because its c e o was working after hours. The fury of an attorney scorned Shakespeare told us about the fury of a woman scorned. Now, Elon Musk's Twitter tells us about the fury of an attorney scorned Twitter, newly acquired by Musk alleges that its former top legal officer expressed his fury in a dramatic way. The lawsuit says he was on notice that he would be fired the moment the sale to Musk closed. So he signed off on an agreement to pay law firm Wachtel Rosen, a 70 million bonus, a success fee for representing Twitter and its battle with Musk 70 million. The board, which also knew it would be replaced when the sale closed, signed off on the success fee. Why were the lawyer and the board so free with Twitter's money? Well, the lawsuit says it's because they knew they were being replaced and no longer cared what happened to Twitter or its money. The suit focuses on the timing to prove its case and the timing is pretty darn interesting. The transfer of the $70 million bonus to the law firm went through at 10 minutes before the 4:00 PM closing. The lawyer who approved it was terminated at 4:01 PM You can't make this stuff up when your deception is too good. Sometimes your deception can be too good. Just ask Uber driver Cheryl Tisdale. Cheryl was an Uber driver from 2015 to 17, but she lost that gig when as she put it, Uber did a background check and quote , something popped up they didn't agree with. Two years later, Cheryl had a cracker jack idea for getting her job back. She paid a woman to get a driver's license, registration and insurance card all under the name. Annie, Molly and Bingo. Cheryl , aka Annie, was an Uber driver. Once again, all went well until she was injured to the tune of $184,000 by an uninsured driver. She naturally turned to the auto insurance provided by Uber. The insurer would've been glad to cover Annie, but they had never heard of Cheryl. They denied the claim. The trial court and Georgia Court of Appeals siding with the insurance company, siding the who is insured and fraud provisions of the auto policy. The case is Tisdale versus Farmers Georgia. Court of Appeals, the evolution of chatbot Esquire. Well , chatbot, G B T, the artificial intelligence chatbot continues its steady evolution from search engine to human lawyer equivalent, you might say it already has the qualities of real lawyers, good and bad alike. First, an experiment at the University of Minnesota Law School demonstrated that the chatbot could pass exams at the law school level sufficient to earn a jd, albeit with a tendency to coast along with a gentleman C and on probation. And everyone has heard that New York lawyer, Steve Schwartz, used a chat bot to write a brief in federal court. The chat bot fulfilled the assignment, albeit with a tendency to fabricate cases when he couldn't find any. Well , now chat bots have passed a third milestone in their revolution. A chatbot has been sued for legal malpractice. That's right, chatbots not only practice law, they get sued for legal malpractice just like real lawyers. Jonathan Floridian sued the company, do not pay all one word self-described as quote the world's first robot lawyer. The company reports that it's called Do Not Pay because it's for people who want legal service but don't wanna pay a lawyer. Jonathan says he used do not pay for legal drafting. Demand letters and small claims filing and its performance did not live up to his expectations and according to his complaint, he was shocked, shocked to discover that the chatbot doesn't have a law degree and isn't a member of the bar. How could he possibly have known? By the way, Jonathan is using a human lawyer to sue, do not pay. The case is Floridian versus do not Pay. Ca , California Superior Court, San Francisco County Complaint Department, sexually explicit books. These days, you're always hearing about the term sexually explicit as applied to books, usually in connection with an effort to ban a book from a library or a classroom. The term bothers me. Why? Because the books people want to ban are not sexually explicit. They're sexually implicit. Say for example, a book says Humans reproduce through sexual intercourse. That's about as explicit as you can get, but I doubt anyone would try to ban it. The same goes for medical and scientific texts that are full of sexually explicit material. Generally, it's when sex is referred to implicitly the way it is in books that used to be called bodice busters, that some people are offended. But the sex in such books is expressed in steamy metaphors and code words and phrases not explicitly. If you have a complaint, send it to me. Well, that's it for this month's edition. I hope you liked it. I'll be back next month with another edition of the Lighter Side of Health Law.

Speaker 1: 9:45

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