Features

In products liability cases in most states, a plaintiff's conduct that contributes to his or her harm does not bar a claim, but instead may be considered by the jury in weighing the comparative fault of the parties. But should a case even have to go to a jury when the very harm that the plaintiff is suing for resulted from the plaintiff's own criminal misconduct?

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Anthony M. Gamboa, Jr. of Vocational Econometrics Inc. (VEI) has produced a new edition of the New Worklife Expectancy Tables (the Tables), which purport to show, using statistical averages, how much work loss an injury will cause over the injured person's lifetime. The Tables are used almost exclusively by plaintiffs to establish damages, especially plaintiffs who have been injured and expect to return to work, or who have missed no work at all at the time of trial.

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The number of doctors and hospitals making virtual house calls has exploded in recent years, which has lawyers cautioning the medical community about the legal dangers of treating and monitoring patients via the Internet. Attorneys warn that virtual medicine ' which has popped up in hospitals and clinics in more than a dozen states in the last 2 years ' could open the floodgates to malpractice claims, privacy disputes and licensure problems.

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Over the past year, hospitals, doctors and health insurers have been meeting to discuss pay-for-performance (P4P), the latest attempt to correct our dysfunctional health-care payment system. The general concept is actually quite simple: Providers of health-care services would be paid more if they achieve certain performance metrics and less if they don't.

Recent rulings of interest to your practice.

The latest news of importance to you and your practice.

Important happenings in the drug and device arena.

Features

The peer review process is indispensable to promotion of quality in medical facilities. A major component of the process is honesty; without open investigation and discussion of adverse events and their causes, meaningful reforms for avoiding the same occurrences again are less likely to be made. To ensure open discourse, nearly every state has enacted laws protecting the confidentiality of peer review proceedings. However, federal law may not always be so deferent to the privacy concerns of the peer review committee. In certain circumstances, what most participants thought would be a closed record under state law might be opened by competing federal law enacted to protect the disabled.