All Topics

• Truck Accidents Unbound

  Ken Margolin | May 14, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Last week, it was a large truck that overturned on Route 128, near Lexington, creating a massive traffic jam for hours. On almost any given day on an elevated ramp near Chelsea, a truck may catapult the guard rail and fall to the road below. Large trucks so frequently cause gridlock, crashes, injuries, and death, on Massachusetts roadways, that reports of the damage they cause, seem...

• Communication Breakdown Results in Death - Medical Malpractice Settlement

  Ken Margolin | May 09, 2007 9:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Failures to communicate continue to bedevil the medical profession. Patient deaths and injuries due to communication breakdowns are especially tragic, because the preventative measure, was often as simple as picking up a telephone or sending a note. In an era of multi-million dollar technology and advanced bioscience, person-to-person communication remains a cornerstone of good medical care....

• Disastrous Distractions

  Ken Margolin | May 07, 2007 7:00 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Driving while chowing down a donut, alternating the snack with a cup of hot coffee, is a time-honored example of dangerous, distracted driving. Even though driving safety researchers preached that drinking a beverage while driving, could lead to car crashes due to distraction, human nature dictated that eating and drinking while driving, was never going to stop. The ante was raised with the...

• Shame

  Ken Margolin | May 03, 2007 4:30 PM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  The much publicized lawsuit by a sitting D.C. administrative judge, seeking $67 million for a lost pair of pants, is a cruel perversion of the justice system. The plaintiff has done immeasurable damage to the hard-working defendants, immigrants from South Korea, to legitimate plaintiffs, the justice system, and, one would think, to his self-respect. The anti-justice forces, aka "tort reformers,"...

• Epidemic of Nursing Home Abuse Continues

  Ken Margolin | April 27, 2007 9:30 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Newspapers are printing an advance overview of a GAO (Government Accountability Office) report, due out next week. The GAO investigated nursing homes receiving Medicaid/Medicare payments, to see if incidences of nursing home abuse had lessened since a 1998 GAO report, targeting such disgraces. The new report is not encouraging. Even homes in which instances of shocking abuse occur, receive...

• Magnetic Building Set Recall

  Ken Margolin | April 24, 2007 1:25 PM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Toys with small, removable parts, continue to pose hazards to children. Last month, Mega Brands, Inc., the maker of "Magnetix" building sets, recalled nearly 4 million of the toys. The recall was an expansion of an original recall of some of the sets, in March 2006. The building sets include magnets that are easily removed, and easily swallowed. To date, at least one death and more than 25...

• Important Massachusetts Slip and Fall Decision

  Ken Margolin | April 23, 2007 3:45 PM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  As I wrote in a recent blog, lawsuits arising from slipping on a foreign substance in a Massachusetts premises were made difficult by the rule that the plaintiff had to show the substance was on the ground long enough for the proprietor to become aware of, and remove it. Many a significant slip and fall case never made it past summary judgment, because of the rule, which the courts considered a...

• Slip, Trip, and Fall Traps

  Ken Margolin | April 19, 2007 1:15 PM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Very serious injuries can result from incidents of slipping, tripping, or falling down. A fall can end careers, from such injuries as broken bones, traumatic brain injury, spine injuries, and others. But winning a fall down case in Massachusetts, is quite difficult. A number of legal theories stand in the way of success for even a severely injured plaintiff. If the incident occurred on a...

• Charitable Immunity - a Failed Principle

  Ken Margolin | April 17, 2007 11:05 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Most catastrophic instances of medical malpractice, are due as much to systemic failures, as to the negligence of any individual. Yet, you will never see a hospital as a defendant in a Massachusetts malpractice jury trial. The hospital - almost all in Massachusetts are non-profit corporations - will not have been named in the lawsuit, or will have been dropped before trial. Regardless of the...

• Wrong-Side/Wrong-Site/Wrong-Procedure/Wrong-Patient

  Ken Margolin | April 11, 2007 10:35 AM | 0 CommentsBoston, MA

  Although wrong-side/wrong-site/wrong-procedure/wrong-patient (WSPE) hospital errors are not common, they occur more often than one would expect. As the phrase implies, WSPE typically means that the right patient has been operated on the wrong side or organ, or that the correct procedure was done - correct for a patient other than the one on whom it was performed. When WSPEs occur, the results...