In Barry v. St. Mary’s Hospital the Plaintiff treated at Defendant – St Mary’s – for injuries he sustained in a car wreck. The defendant asserted 3 liens against the Plaintiff’s personal injury claim which he had against a third party who was not involved in this case. The defendant eventually submitted two of the three bills to Plaintiff’s health insurance. The third remained a lien on the Plaintiff’s personal injury case. Plaintiff filed suit against St Mary’s claiming several things, including consumer fraud, third party beneficiary, and breach of contract. In this lawsuit, the plaintiff claimed that the defendant must Read more…
Category: Springfield Injury Lawyer Blog
There has been little guidance from the courts in Illinois about electronic discovery. The Illinois Supreme Court has changed the rules a little bit to accommodate electronic issues. But for the most part we treat electronic discovery the same way we treat paper discovery. Facebook posts are discoverable to some extent and get used in the courts. Electronic documents are discoverable under the discovery rules. The appellate courts are slow to get cases because unless a litigant wants to take the time and money fighting about it the issues frequently just get resolved at the trial courts, without appellate review. Read more…
The court in Steak and Shake vs the Worker’s Compensation Commission addressed what is now a common issue in politics. Groups in Illinois wish to limit liability for workers’ compensation claims by only allowing the case to be compensable if it is the “primary cause” of the condition. This naturally sounds reasonable to people in the public. Why shouldn’t the primary cause be the test? What people fail to appreciate is that “primary cause” in workers’ compensation claims really means eliminating aggravations of pre-existing injuries as claims. The Steak and Shake case is it is a good example of why suing “primary cause” as Read more…
The appellate court recently held that offset language in uninsured / underinsured policies with plaintiffs injured by two defendants does not apply. Throwing out the offset language is counterintuitive to most lawyers. Lawyers are taught that you apply the language of the contract. This case reminds us that the terms of the insurance policy are applied generally, but that there are exceptions to general statements. In Tufano the court held that the policy holder must be placed in the same position as if each tortfeasor carried the same as amount of insurance as the injury victim. Furthermore, one tortfeasor’s payment cannot be Read more…
The Illinois fourth District Court of Appeals decided, on July 15, 2016, in Miller vs. Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center, that medical bills are not reduced to the amount paid by insurers in personal injury suits. This case creates a split in circuits because a different case entitled Perkey vs Portes -Jarol, from 2013 decides the opposite on virtually identical facts. In Perkey a party ask to appeal to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court denied leave to appeal. With this court case from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals there is a split in circuits, which suggests the Supreme Court will take Read more…
In Chlada vs Illinois Workers Compensation Commission the Workers Compensation Commission ruled that a person can get a wage loss differential and a permanent total claim. The case involved two injuries. The first injury resulted in the person being paid less than before the injury. After the second injury the worker could not work at all. In Chlada the injured worker had an injury to his low back first, lifting beer as a beer truck driver. The worker got hurt again on October 23, 2003, when he hurt his neck working in the warehouse. The worker filed two claims, one for each Read more…
Medical error is now the third leading cause of death in the United States. The first two are heart disease and cancer. This, according to a British Medical Journal analysis by Martin Makary and Michael Daniel, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. This article follows on several studies, including the landmark Institute of Medicine “To Err Is Human.” In To Err Is Human The Institute of Medicine, the branch of the government that studies medical issues, found that 98,000 people were dying from medical errors in the United States. This put the number of deaths at higher than Read more…
In civil rights cases plaintiff typically uses statute called section 1983. This statute which allows for the plaintiff to file suit for violations of their constitutional rights. The statute gives a person the right to file suit against a person who is a government employee for deprivation of any rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution and law. The statute gives the plaintiff the right to recover attorney’s fees incurred. The attorney’s fee shifting provision makes this an attractive statute for victims of constitutional rights violations. The statute had been interpreted to provide liability if and only if the Read more…
The Supreme Court eliminated the public duty rule in the case of Coleman vs East Joliet Fire Protection District. The common-law public duty rule provided that governmental entities, such as fire and police entities, were immune from liability for things like responding to calls. In Coleman the court got rid of the immunity and substituted willful and wanton misconduct as the test for governmental liability. In Coleman plaintiff resided with her husband in an unincorporated area of Will County. She called 911 indicating that her husband could not breathe and needed an ambulance. She asked the person on the 911 line to hurry Read more…
An old case, Abood, holds that unions can require nonunion members to pay their fair share of union dues because they benefit from the union negotiating for them. Abood said this applies to public sector jobs like state jobs. Abood v. Detroit Bd. Of Ed., 431 U.S. 209, 232 (1977). Specifically, Abood says a state may allow public sector unions to charge nonunion members fees “insofar as the service charges are applied to collective-bargaining, contract administration, and grievance-adjustment purposes.” 431 U.S. at 232. However, the Supreme Court recently suggested the opposite. In Harris v Quinn 573 U.S. (2014) the court held that the First Amendment prohibits a State Read more…