Vegas Personal Injury Law Blog

Over the past few years the media has been reporting on an alleged conspiracy in our medical legal community involving prominent attorneys, judges, a medical consultant, and doctors.  This scandal has been labeled “Las Vegas’ Medical Mafia”.

It began with a motor vehicle accident where the adverse driver was a federal prosecutor.  Obviously, there are two sides to every story.  The media has concentrated on the medical-legal unethical conduct.  There has been little coverage concerning the interaction between the prosecutors and the auto insurance companies.  Ironically, to date, nobody has actually been convicted.  Some doctors have been given immunity, and one doctor is about to enter a plea bargain with the prosecution.  The details of this proposed plea bargain have recently been made public.

The end result of all this has been detrimental to the already tarnished image of attorneys handling personal injury cases.  Why do these things happen?

Insurance companies on one hand are very concerned with fraud which costs them billions of dollars annually.  They don’t like big verdicts, even though they have almost unlimited resources to defend these cases.  So the insurance industry is motivated to protect their financial interests by setting examples of attorneys, doctors, and consultants who are involved in large verdicts.

On the other hand, zealous representation of personal injury victims sometimes involves going to the absolute limits of what is permitted by the rules of professional conduct.  The closer that an attorney gets to the line, the greater the chance of crossing it.  The more often a medical-legal professional goes to the line, the more blurred the ethical boundary line becomes.

The zealous defense of personal injury claims also involves some danger of crossing ethical boundary lines.  Attorneys for both sides experience anxiety when deciding over how far they can go in the representation and defense of their clients.  Both sides are motivated by ego and financial gain.  In order to win a personal injury case, there must be cooperation between the attorney and his medical witnesses.  How far can this cooperation go before it is labeled collusion?  All this is a part of the war that goes on between accident victims, insurance companies, personal injury attorneys and defense attorneys.

So what do we come away with from all of this?

The bottom-line is that there are many victims of auto accidents that are never fully compensated.  Many victims, years after they have settled their auto accident claim, will need spinal surgery.  There are others perhaps that are overcompensated.  The more medical-legal pressure that is applied in a personal injury case, the greater the risk that one side will cross the line between ethical and non-ethical conduct.

So, both sides of the medical-legal war need to step back and take a good look at what they are doing to bolster their position.  Be cognizant of the ethical limits of zealous representation.  If you believe that the other side is crossing the line, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you also need to cross the line to protect your client’s interests.

We should all be concerned about the damage that the “Las Vegas’ Medical Mafia” cases have done to the reputations of our medical-legal community.  It’s up to us to repair this damage by making sure that our future conduct does not involve any risk of unethical behavior to achieve quality representation of our personal injury clients.  If the “Las Vegas’ Medical Mafia” media coverage has taught us anything, it has more clearly defined the line between professional and non-professional conduct, and has given us some examples of what we should not get involved in while representing our personal injury clients.