Personal Injury Law

Loss of Chance/Opportunity: New Opinion from Michigan

The Michigan Supreme Court came out a few weeks ago with a very interesting opinion in favor of the Plaintiff in a malpractice claim that most likely would fail in Maryland.

The doctor's malpractice attorneys argued that the allegation that the doctor's negligence caused a reduction in the risk of stroke from 10 to 20 percent to less than 5 to 10 percent was not enough to get the claim to a jury because the loss was not sufficient enough to meet the burden of proof on proximate causation. The doctor argued that Michigan law is whether the opportunity to achieve a better result was greater than 50 percent. Under this law, if the plaintiff could not prove that receiving the alleged appropriate treatment would have decreased his risk of injury by 50%, plaintiff's claim would fail.

Thankfully, a divided Michigan high court found that this is not the law and that malpractice cases such as this should be decided under a simple principle: the plaintiff is required to prove that the doctor's negligence more probably than not caused the plaintiff?s injury.

Regrettably, Maryland goes in a different direction on these types of cases as I have previously discussed. One thing Maryland has Michigan beat on is collegiality among the judges on the court. Battles in the Michigan Supreme Court are both political and personal in a way that would shock Maryland lawyers. Judges quoting political statements made by other judges to the press, the judge that wrote the majority opinion writing separately to refute one judge's personal attack - if you have no interest in this issue it is worth reading the opinion just to get a taste of what this different world is like.

Full post as published by Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on August 16, 2010 (boomark / email).