LJN Newsletters

Congress recently amended the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) to include what has become known as the 'Privacy Rule,' a statutory provision addressing the privacy of health information. The Rule covers health care providers, health care clearinghouses and health plans, including employer-sponsored group health plans.

Recent cases of importance to your practice.

Justice Lucindo Suarez took a bold step February 5 when he judicially imposed a rate of $90 an hour for assigned counsel.

Have you considered making your matrimonial practice collaborative? That's the system currently gaining favor around the country whereby divorcing couples seek to resolve issues with the aid of collaborative attorneys who take part in discussions involving both divorcing parties and their attorneys.

It never fails to amaze me. Educated professionals, usually of the legal variety, begin discussing the state of our civil justice system. A discussion of the adversarial system ensues. Debating what is wrong with it, or perhaps, (thanks to those 'half-full glass' types) ways in which it could be improved, is usually an animated segment of the discussion.

Envision the following scenario, which is not necessarily commonplace, but not unheard of, either: Your client, the mother of a 9-year-old girl and two boys, aged 2 and 5, has been married for 14 years, most of them unhappy. Your client has been struggling with, and is being treated for, a series of psychological problems, including bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation and post-partum trauma disorder. The client has been a stay-at-home mother, attending to the demands of three children with busy schedules. Her marital problems have increased dramatically since the birth of the youngest child, to the point where she now believes the domestic discord is detrimental to her own as well as to her children's emotional well-being.

A plaintiff who alleges that lack of oxygen during a botched delivery caused a child's cerebral palsy might have a new obstacle to proving causation, if juries give credence to a recent report commissioned by two major medical organizations.

FloridaWin for Woman Claiming Abuse During Pap SmearA woman who claimed that a doctor molested her during a pap smear was awarded $280,000 by a Florida jury on February 27, 2003. Kathy Murphy, a 49-year-old painter and massage therapist, claimed that Dr. William Charles Leach, of Naples, FL, asked her to help perform a 'new pap smear technique' where she was required to massage her vagina. She claimed that the doctor masturbated near her. Leach did not attend the trial, and the plaintiff obtained a default judgment.