Legal Malpractice

Legal Malpractice Verdict after Medical Malpractice in a Death Case

By (Andrew Lavoott Bluestone)

Failure to diagnose breast cancer...it's a horrible thing.  When we think of a family member who could have been saved, who dies because of medical negligence, where a simple mammogram or simply reading it correctly could have made a difference...

Here, after a death, the medical malpractice case was bungled, and a legal malpractice case finally led to a verdict against the attorney who didn't sue the doctor.

"A Hinds County jury returned a $375,000 judgment Tuesday in a legal malpractice case.
Varnado and attorney Robin Blair, also of Hattiesburg, represented the sister of a Sunflower County woman who died of breast cancer in 1999.

The woman filed a lawsuit against Jackson lawyer Isaac Byrd Jr. and his firm and lawyer Howard Bowen, who initially handled the case.

Barbara Butler said in the lawsuit heard in Hinds County Circuit Court that her sister, Jacqueline Farmer, 59, died in June 1999 after not getting a mammogram in eight years despite going to her regular physician during a portion of that time.

Butler initially went to Bowen to have a lawsuit filed against the doctor, who worked at a clinic in Indianola. Bowen turned the case over to Byrd in October 1999, according to Blair.

Blair said Byrd requested and received Farmer's medical records but didn't file the lawsuit until 2001, a year after the statute of limitations to file such a lawsuit expired.

But Byrd's attorney, Felecia Perkins of Jackson, said the medical malpractice lawsuit was filed in Sunflower County and the presiding judge never ruled the statute of limitations had expired prior to the case" being filed.

Full post as published by New York Attorney Malpractice Blog on January 17, 2008 (boomark / email).