Uncovering the Silent Victims of the American Medical Liability System

A frequently overlooked problem with the current medical liability system is the vast number of medical errors that go uncompensated. Although studies indicate that 1% of hospital patients are victims of medical negligence, fewer than 2% of these injured patients file claims. In this Article, I explain that many victims of medical malpractice do not file claims because they are unable to find attorneys willing to take their cases. I conducted the first national survey of attorneys to explore medical malpractice victims' access to the civil justice system. The results from the survey indicate that the economic reality of litigation forces many contingent fee attorneys to reject legitimate cases. In fact, over 75% of the attorneys in my survey indicate that they reject more than 90% of the cases that they screen. The attorneys explain that insufficient damages and high litigation expenses are their primary reasons for rejecting cases and that several tort reforms have reduced their willingness to accept cases. Moreover, the majority of the attorneys report that they have threshold damage values below which they will not even consider accepting a case. Indeed, over half of the attorneys responded that they will not accept a case unless expected damages are at least $250,000 even for a case they are almost certain to win on the merits. For a case in which winning is less certain, most attorneys require minimum expected damages of $500,000 to accept the case. Because of the high cost of medical malpractice litigation, contingent fee attorneys simply cannot economically justify taking cases with damages below these thresholds. To understand the extent of this access-to-justice problem, I use private-industry claims data to show that 95% of medical malpractice victims will find it extremely difficult to find legal representation unless their damages are significantly larger than the typical damages for their types of injuries. Thus, the medical liability system silences many legitimate victims of medical malpractice.