Course Description
This course examines personal injury litigation against health care providers (physicians, nurses, hospitals and HMO's, to name a few). Most law students are familiar with the basic concepts of personal injury litigation, at least of the "red car hits blue car" genre. Medical liability litigation introduces many complexities, including, but in no way limited to, challenging nuances concerning extraordinary procedural requirements, financing cases, obtaining and qualifying experts, adducing and presenting scientific evidence, the standard of care, causation, damages, joint and vicarious liability, product liability and tort reform. The course will be both practical and theoretical. In addition to readings in a traditional casebook, students will study the basic steps of a medical liability case from the client interview through accepting a case, doing discovery and pretrial work, trial and appeal. Documents will be available if the student wishes to build a "form file" for future use. Examination of the various stages of medical liability litigation and the textbook material will both entail consideration of underlying strategic, policy and jurisprudential issues. The course is good preparation for any type of relatively complex litigation.
Updated: 04/05/2011