A Forest Hill resident has filed a $1 million lawsuit against his former attorney in Baltimore City Circuit Court, alleging that the lawyer failed to pursue claims arising out of an automobile accident before the statute of limitations had passed.

Plaintiff Dennis Vierling claims he asked lawyer Ernest S. Nichols for an explanation when he received a dunning letter for his hospital bills, more than three years after the accident.

Nichols stated that he was aware that the statute of limitations had lapsed, the complaint alleges, but wanted to make sure that his malpractice insurance premium was paid up-to-date before informing Vierling of the situation.

Vierling is suing Nichols for, among other things, misrepresentation, negligence and breach of contract. The complaint also accuses Nichols of violating the Maryland Lawyers Rules of Professional Conduct regarding client communication and diligence.

I don’t have any comment, said Nichols when reached by phone at his Bel Air office on Monday.

Thomas J. Dolina, who is representing Vierling in the case, did not return several calls this week.

The complaint alleges that Vierling was injured in an automobile accident on March 8, 2000, and underwent numerous medical procedures and incurred considerable medical expenses as a result.

Vierling alleges that he heard from a bill collector for St. Agnes Hospital in April 2003 and called the other driver’s insurance company that June or July.

He was told that no claim had ever been filed on [his] behalf and that the three year statute of limitations had lapsed and no claim could be filed, the complaint says.

Vierling also alleges that he tried to reach Nichols on several occasions, but the lawyer did not return his calls until August 2003.

If Nichols had not been negligent, the complaint alleges, Vierling would have prevailed if timely filed, and would have collected under his claim for personal injury damages as a result of the March 8, 2000, automobile collision.

It is not known whether Vierling has filed a disciplinary complaint with the Attorney Grievance Commission, which, according to its Web site, investigates and, where indicated, prosecutes attorneys whose conduct violates the Maryland Lawyers Rules of Professional Conduct.

A spokeswoman for the commission said its records do not show any public discipline imposed against Nichols. The commission does not disclose ongoing investigations.

There is a tremendous lack of understanding between physicians and lawyers, and the persistent hostility between these two professions is counterproductive. However, professionals in these fields have more in common than one might think. With some effort on both sides, they should be able to understand each other better.

Ob.gyns. go into medicine to heal. They want to deliver babies and do the other wonderful things that drew them into obstetrics and medical care in general. But they also want to make a living, raise their children, and have a good life.

Lawyers want to represent their clients well. They want to give their clients security and help to ensure a future for people who suffer devastating injuries. They care about their clients just as physicians care about their patients. And, like physicians, lawyers want to make a living, provide for their families, and have a good future.

Everyone has heard the message from insurance companies, and read everywhere, that ours is a litigious society. However, most people are not as litigious as you may think. The overwhelming majority of people who seek the help of a lawyer hate the idea of a lawsuit. They are just in desperate circumstances.

Although physicians practice in fear of a lawsuit, there are fewer cases filed per capita today than there were in the 1700s! The majority of noncriminal trial days in U.S. courtrooms today involve corporations suing each other and family law disputes. In the area of obstetric litigation, the number of lawsuits filed is declining. Walk the hallways of most civil courthouses, and you will find the courtrooms dark and the judges in chambers wondering where the lawsuits went.

Are there obnoxious lawyers? Oh, yes. Are there lawyers who take trivial or frivolous cases? Yes, but not many because they quickly will go out of business. Medical cases are expensive and risky, and the lawyer does not get paid unless the lawsuit is successful. Most lawyers who do this work are interested only in very clear and very serious cases. Anything else represents potential economic disaster.

Are there lousy physicians? Yes. You’ve probably dealt with some and heard of others. But these are the exceptions. I’ve been a plaintiff’s attorney for 36 years and practiced in many different states. Very, very few times have I run into a lousy physician whom I felt shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine. Most of the physicians who end up on the other side of the table from me are very competent, caring physicians who just made a human mistake that caused a serious injury. When they face a potential lawsuit, it’s just another aspect of the medicine business–an aspect that they don’t understand and certainly don’t like, but it’s just part of doing business.

I’m a professional liability specialist. I don’t just sue doctors, I also sue lawyers and other professionals such as architects and accountants. That’s right–lawyers get sued, too. Indeed, many lawyers, including myself, have been sued at one time or another. No professional likes to be accused of malpractice or even to be challenged. The difference is that lawyers understand the process better than most physicians because they are dealing in their own arena. Lawsuits are part of the business. As a physician, the more you understand about the legal process, the better you will be able to deal with this aspect of the business life.

Let me explain where plaintiffs come from in obstetric cases. This is how a client typically finds me:

A woman who assumed she had a normal baby gives birth to a baby with a serious defect. She feels that her baby has been destroyed. Perhaps she and the father hear from pediatric neurologists that they are facing a lifetime of 24-hour-a-day care. The parents may feel that their lives are being ruined, that the lives of their other children and extended family members are being ruined. They may wonder, “What do I do about this? How do I provide for my child?” These are the kinds of thoughts that drive some people to seek help.

Most people do not turn to lawyers. One study found that only 10% of “actionable” medical cases (situations where patients had a legitimate reason to sue) ever resulted in a legal filing because in the other 90% of cases, the patients weren’t angry. They went on with their lives. There are people out there who have brain-damaged babies but they love their doctors and they never sought the advice of a lawyer. Why? Probably because their doctors continued to communicate with them.

Often new clients complain that the doctor stopped talking to them. The doctor shut down when there was a bad result. The doctor wouldn’t answer their questions or be honest with them. Other doctors involved in the case stopped talking to them. A wall went up. These people are not stupid, and they get angry. Then they go see their general-practice lawyer, or a lawyer whom a friend knows, and that lawyer calls me. It is a rare occasion for a person to come to me and say, “I want to sue.” Clients usually say, “I’ve never sued anyone, and I hate the idea of suing. Nobody in my family has ever sued. But I don’t know what to do about this terrible situation.”

Article Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYD/is_6_40/ai_n13598804

Texas Mesothelioma lawyer Nick Johnson of Johnson Law Group, with principal offices in Houston, Texas, announced today that they have signed more than a dozen new mesothelioma cases already in 2007. Unlike other law firms practicing mesothelioma cases that are downsizing, Johnson Law Group is staffing up for a heavier caseload this year.

“We are no longer doing medical malpractice cases,” says Johnson. “We have found a common ground with doctors and lawyers in the area of mesothelioma. Most doctors do not realize until after we’ve met with them how blatantly negligent the manufacturers of asbestos have been throughout history. This type of case is so tragic and the blame is so easy to prove. At the same time, the cost of treatment is obviously astronomical. We believe we’re helping patients not only recover a bit of justice but we’re helping to provide the funds required for treatment through legal recourse.”

Asbestos cases are recorded as far back as 1899, according to an abstract entitled “Curious Bodies” by Dr. H. Montague Murray, a London physician, who did a post mortem exam on an asbestos factory worker. It is believed that the asbestos industry has long concealed the research results from asbestos tests. Those tests proved conclusively the direct link between asbestos fibers and mesothelioma.

California Mesothelioma lawyer Nick Johnson of Johnson Law Group, with principal offices in Houston, Texas, announced today that they have signed more than a dozen new mesothelioma cases already in 2007. Unlike other law firms practicing mesothelioma cases that are downsizing, Johnson Law Group is staffing up for a heavier caseload this year.

“We do not do medical malpractice cases,” says Johnson. “We have found a common ground with doctors and lawyers in the area of mesothelioma. Most doctors do not realize until after we’ve met with them how blatantly negligent the manufacturers of asbestos have been throughout history. This type of case is so tragic and the blame is so easy to prove. At the same time, the cost of treatment is obviously astronomical. We believe we’re helping patients not only recover a bit of justice but we’re helping to provide the funds required for treatment through legal recourse.”

Asbestos cases are recorded as far back as 1899, according to an abstract entitled “Curious Bodies” by Dr. H. Montague Murray, a London physician, who did a post mortem exam on an asbestos factory worker. It is believed that the asbestos industry has long concealed the research results from asbestos tests. Those tests proved conclusively the direct link between asbestos fibers and mesothelioma.

Louisiana Mesothelioma lawyer Nick Johnson of Johnson Law Group, with principal offices in Houston, Texas, announced today that they have signed more than a dozen new mesothelioma cases already in 2007. Unlike other law firms practicing mesothelioma cases that are downsizing, Johnson Law Group is staffing up for a heavier caseload this year.

“We do not do medical malpractice cases,” says Johnson. “We have found a common ground with doctors and lawyers in the area of mesothelioma. Most doctors do not realize until after we’ve met with them how blatantly negligent the manufacturers of asbestos have been throughout history. This type of case is so tragic and the blame is so easy to prove. At the same time, the cost of treatment is obviously astronomical. We believe we’re helping patients not only recover a bit of justice but we’re helping to provide the funds required for treatment through legal recourse.”

Asbestos cases are recorded as far back as 1899, according to an abstract entitled “Curious Bodies” by Dr. H. Montague Murray, a London physician, who did a post mortem exam on an asbestos factory worker. It is believed that the asbestos industry has long concealed the research results from asbestos tests. Those tests proved conclusively the direct link between asbestos fibers and mesothelioma.

“The Bush administration has been going to court to block lawsuits by consumers who say they have been injured by prescription drugs and medical devices.” (New York Times 7/25/04). This is an interesting and theoretically justifiable principle. It is founded on the belief that if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sanctioned a product that has met governmental safety standards, to allow lawsuits would mean that federal safety standards are set (Bush administration quote) “insufficiently high and this belief would undermine public health.”

This thought-provoking concept could be extended in many directions. Such a principle would mean that determinations of harm would be taken from lay panels of jurors and judges. This is something I favor. I also favor removing malpractice from the tort system and making it an arbitration process through a specialized commission system in which independent experts, with the help of lay panelists, would independently review cases. This would allow more suits to be filed and more cases to be reviewed, with, hopefully, more appropriate fines, also removing 1/3 of the fee that goes to the lawyer. However, that’s a separate, albeit related, issue. This principle could also be extended to protect tobacco companies from lawsuits once nicotine is regulated by the FDA. It could expand into health related fields to mean that once the government has declared a site as not-toxic then citizens could not sue for damages. In short, the government knows best and once it has taken a position it cannot be challenged.

There are certain tenets that we must agree on before we can assume that drugs and devices are safe simply because the FDA says so. How can we assume that the FDA is fair, honest, and diligent? We have increasing data to show that the FDA has become politicized. Abortefacients recently became the first type of drug where the FDA overruled its own expert panel. With that obvious political statement, how can we be certain that future judgments won’t be tainted by industry ties, or political connections? The FDA has in the past few years allowed advertising of prescription drugs, for the first time empowering patients to choose their medications. This creates a market force that is difficult to resist and clearly represents a tilt towards industry.

It is not uncommon for a drug to be approved by the FDA and then discovered to cause an adverse effect not found in the pre-approval testing process. Effects that occur only once in a thousand cases say, will not be found until tens of thousands of people use the drug. I would argue that a company should not have responsibility for these uncommon side effects so long as it has scrupulously kept up its post-marketing surveillance and reported every adverse event to the FDA in a timely manner. The companies must be trustworthy. This requires full disclosure. During the spring and summer of 2004, drug companies have been successfully sued for failing to publish data or even submit them to the FDA when drugs have proven to be ineffective. Sometimes these negative studies have occurred in studies of disorders close to the approved indications. Specifically, I’m referring to antidepressants which work in adults but possibly not in children. If no drug is approved for childhood depression (or some other disorder) but is approved for the adult condition, then it makes sense for doctors to use the adult preparation in children, especially when no drug has been approved for this problem. This is done all the time, and for some drugs the “off label” uses outstrip the approved indication. But when a study finds no efficacy and the result is then buried, while doctors, with the knowledge of the companies, continue using the drug for this indication, because they don’t know it doesn’t work, then a moral line has been crossed. Equally disturbing is the fact that these lawsuits were instituted by New York State and not the federal government. The FDA did not seem to manifest any interest in the problem, perhaps a sign of bureaucratic inertia, lack of funding to do an adequate job, or political ideology (or worse).

The heart of the matter, as I see it, is responsibility. Allowing companies to hide behind an FDA approval fairly begs companies, many of which have been successfully sued in the past year for malfeasance of various types, to be less thorough and less safe. Why would we trust a company that hides data showing their drug to be useless while continuing to suggest the opposite? How can it be trusted to collect and publish data that reveals adverse effects unless it is required to, and that this requirement carries stringent penalties in case of default; and that the monitoring agency is reliable and honorable?

I do not see why pharmaceutical companies should be treated differently than car manufacturers. If the drug or device is found to cause harm once it’s approved, that problem must be monitored and reported to the FDA (as is currently the case). When this effort is not diligent the company should be sanctioned by the FDA. When the FDA fails to do the job properly it seems that the only recourse a consumer would have is a lawsuit. To deny this possibility will not only reduce the public safety but undermine our confidence in the FDA approval process, the very principle the federal government states it is trying to strengthen.

BOSTON (AP) — One day after getting married, a lesbian couple filed a medical malpractice lawsuit asking that one of the women receive damages because doctors failed to detect breast cancer in her spouse.

The lawsuit filed Friday claims “loss of consortium” for Cindy Kalish, 39, because of the advanced breast cancer in new wife Michelle Charron, 44.

Loss of consortium is a legal claim long available to spouses, but only newly available to gay and lesbian couples since the state began allowing same-sex marriage Monday. The lawsuit provides a glimpse into the kinds of legal battles involving gay and lesbian unions that Massachusetts courts can now expect.

“I think there will be tons and tons of incidental issues, and this apparently is the first one,” said Boston lawyer Steven Schreckinger.

The $250,000 cap on “pain and suffering” damage awards in California malpractice suits has not been raised in 30 years. And that’s just fine with many physicians in the state.

“It’s a tremendous benefit for us, but it’s still not enough,” said Dr. Peter Weiss, a Beverly Hills ob.gyn. who has been in practice for 19 years. “Malpractice is still a major concern.”

Dr. Weiss was referring to the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of 1975 (MICRA), which caps noneconomic damages at $250,000.

Another MICRA fan is Dr. Philip Diamond, a San Diego ob.gyn. who is active in Californians Allied for Patient Protection (CAPP), a grassroots organization that supports the current law. “MICRA makes people whole,” he said. “It provides for full economic damages–lost earnings, medical care, rehabilitation costs. Everything’s covered. The only thing it doesn’t do is allow people to become multi-millionaires because of pain and suffering.”

But attorneys and patients say the cap is too low. One state senator, Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch), is planning to introduce legislation next year that would raise the cap to $900,000, and a consumer group is considering putting a referendum on the ballot to eliminate the cap altogether.

Robert Oakes, a spokesman for Sen. Torlakson, said the senator’s bill was spurred in part by the experience of constituents who tried to hire a lawyer to represent them after their 7-year-old daughter’s death, allegedly as a result of medical malpractice. They say they were repeatedly turned down by lawyers who said the case was not worth taking because of the cap.

The couple’s difficulty in finding an attorney doesn’t surprise James C. Sturdevant, president of Consumer Attorneys of California, a Sacramento-based group that favors increasing the cap. “If you’re going to hire competent doctors [as expert witnesses] who come from the University of California, San Francisco, or Stanford Medical School, you’re going to pay a high hourly rate for the work they do,” he said. “Some of them are just looking at few pages of medical records, but what if you are doing an elaborate investigation as to the cause and effect of the negligence, and having to take depositions at the experts’ hourly rate, and hiring statisticians and experts? The cost can easily be somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000.”

Add that to the fact that the attorney will be paid a maximum 40% contingency fee, or $100,000 in the case of a $250,000 award. In the example described, “that would not even cover out-of-pocket costs, to say nothing of the time invested by lawyer. That’s why it’s a disincentive,” Mr. Sturdevant said.

The cap adversely affects the people with the most serious injuries, he said. “If you have a child who suffers brain damage as result of medical negligence, the child may be physically healthy and may end up living 75 years. Other than covering medical costs, the child receives virtually no [economic] compensation because he or she doesn’t have a wage history.”

Dr. Diamond, who represents the California chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists at CAPP, said he is skeptical that most people have trouble finding a malpractice attorney. But he admitted that the issue of pain and suffering payments for cases involving babies “is a difficult one,” although it’s a trade-off society must make.

“If you want to give those people $1 million or $5 million, that money’s going to have to come from somewhere,” he said. “We have tough decisions to make, and raising the cap on noneconomic damages hurts patient access [to care].”

That’s because if the cap is raised, physicians would then need to increase the limits of their malpractice coverage, which would mean paying higher premiums, Dr. Diamond explained. “If that happens, we’ll have to increase revenues, but we can’t do it with Medi-Cal [California’s version of Medicaid] patients because our revenues are so poor and we can’t increase the fees. So doctors will cut back on seeing the lowest-reimbursing patients, and that tends to be the uninsured and those on Medi-Cal.”

Peter Warren, spokesman for the California Medical Association (CMA), said the impact of increased malpractice premiums is a big one.

“If you’re an ob.gyn. and your malpractice [premium] is $250,000 a year and you get $2,000 for delivering a baby, [then] you have to deliver 125 babies a year–almost 3 babies a week–just to pay your insurance,” Mr. Warren said. “Then think of all the other costs you have, let alone the idea that you want to make a living to warrant the fact you’re in school for 20 years. That’s why you see ob.gyns. who don’t do obstetrics any more.”

Lawrence E. Smarr, who is president of the Physician Insurers Association of America, a Rockville, Md., trade group that represents malpractice insurers, said raising the cap to $900,000 would not work very well because nationwide, the average verdict against an individual physician is $430,000–well below the amount of the proposed cap–so a cap that big would not reduce very many awards.

IF A DRUNK driver plows into you from behind at 70 miles an hour while you are stopped at a red light, you are not likely to live long enough to talk to a lawyer about it. However, Patricia Anderson and her passengers were lucky enough to be riding in a 1979 Chevy Malibu, a car much more solidly built than most of its competition. Six victims survived but suffered severe burns because the immense force of the crash had burst the Malibu’s gas tank and ignited a fire.

Although the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration did not (and does not) deem the Malibu’s gas tank to be defective in placement, design, construction, or any other way, lawyers for Anderson disagreed and proceeded to sue General Motors, saying the fire might have been averted had the company located the tank somewhere other than toward the rear of the Malibu. (They also disagreed on the crash speed, estimating it at 50 mph.) A Los Angeles jury agreed and m 1999 awarded the plaintiffs $4.9 billion–a figure that exceeded the combined gross domestic product of II U.N. member states.

The award in Anderson v. G.M., later reduced to $1.2 billion, caused something of an outcry. The Washington Post said in an editorial that it “makes the tort system into a kind of lottery in which clever trial lawyers and a few victims get very rich at the cost of society’s confidence in the justice system.” The conduct of the trial had been open to question as well. It turned out that, at the plaintiffs’ request, L.A. County Superior Judge Ernest Williams had agreed to exclude from evidence various matters that G.M. wanted to introduce.

Among them were federal government statistics from 20 years of real-world highway experience showing the Malibu to be among the safest cars of its time, with an unusually low crash fatality rate. Nor was the company permitted to introduce crash test data raising safety concerns about the alternative placement of the gas tank that the plaintiffs maintained would be better. Most remarkable of all, Williams had excluded from evidence the fact that the driver of the other car had been drunk (having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.20 percent “several hours later”) and had been sent to prison.

As late as the 1980s, jury verdicts higher than, say, $50 million still counted as sensational, but by the end of the century only a billion-dollar verdict could be counted on to merit front-page treatment. Within days of the Los Angeles jury’s decision in Anderson v. G.M., a rural California jury voted $290 million over a Ford Bronco rollover accident; like the Chevy Malibu, the Bronco exceeded the federal safety standards of its day. Later, another L.A. jury voted $3 billion in punitive damages in a tobacco case filed by an individual smoker who testified that he’d had no idea the habit was dangerous until congressional hearings in 1994.

Even that paled alongside what happened in a Miami courtroom in July 1999. Following a trial that took two years, a jury deliberated for a mere five hours before deciding that the tobacco industry should pay $145 billion in punitive damages–a sum more than twice the gross domestic product of New Zealand–for having behaved badly toward Florida smokers.

One of the plaintiffs, a 44-year-old nurse, said she “had no idea there was anything wrong with cigarettes at all.” The verdict, in a class action styled Engle v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, followed a series of rulings by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Robert Kaye that were highly favorable to the plaintiffs. The Engle verdict was greeted with a less than respectful reception in much of the press. The Cincinnati Enquirer called it “ridiculous” and “outrageous,” adding, “A ruling that completely ignores personal responsibility is a joke.” The San Diego Union-Tribune deemed the jury’s decision “monstrous” and “outlandish.” The Washington Post declared, “The biggest damages here may be to the reputation of the legal system.” The Indianapolis Star said the award “falls somewhere between confiscation and robbery.” In November 2000, Judge Kaye upheld the verdict, and the tobacco companies announced their intent to appeal.

Defenders of the legal system typically dismiss cases like Anderson and Engle as atypical. And it is true that only a tiny number of juries return from deliberations having approved the kind of numbers too large to fit on a calculator display. Moreover, in many of these cases judges subsequently cut the size of the damage award, though usually to a level that is still stratospheric.

But the mere possibility that an extreme outcome will emerge from the process, and perhaps survive review and appeal, gets factored into negotiations in the majority of cases that are settled before a final verdict. With breast implants, asbestos, and many other mass tort episodes, a rash of arrestingly high verdicts helped educate recalcitrant defendants about the need to pony up substantial settlements.

While the press sometimes refers to these eye-popping awards as “runaway” verdicts, the term is more often than not misleading, since it suggests that juries are racing off madly on a tear of their own. Quite the contrary is usually true: Most “runaway” juries are behaving precisely as one set of lawyers has been carefully coaching and skillfully inciting them to do. They are, for the most part, not running away from anything but running toward a resolution of the case that trial advocates have portrayed to them as reasonable. In seeking to account for exorbitant or unjust verdicts, the most relevant question to ask is usually not, “Why did these jurors behave so irrationally?” but rather, “How did the lawyers manage to portray this outcome as rational?”

Editor’s note: The following roundtable discussion of Missouri’s lawyer advertising rules took place at Hannegan’s Restaurant on March 4. The rules changes are in the hands of the Missouri Supreme Court. At press time, the court had yet to decide to approve or not approve the changes.

CONNAGHAN: I want to thank everybody for coming here today. Might as well just start off and ask, what are the major revisions that the committee came up with on the rule changes?

LEVISON: I think asking what the major revisions are is kind of, in some ways, in the eyes of the beholder depending on where you’re sitting. To me - I know this isn’t answering your question - but as a threshold, as a threshold, I would just think it’s worth pointing out that the committee took a look at lawyer advertising, and we took a pretty long look at it.

We weren’t in a hurry to suggest new rules, and in fact, we’re still not in a hurry. We’ve done our work; we’ve made our proposal. It’s at the Supreme Court, and I know they’re going to give it due consideration.

And it’s just a guess, but my guess is when one group does something, another group looks at it, they seldom say, OK. Everything’s perfect.

So, you know, I would guess they may have their own input on this, so we’re a ways away from the final product, I would think.

But we were trying - when you ask what’s major here - our first threshold was, let’s get the rules clear. Because we had a sense that the rules were not clear enough for the lawyers who practice every day and for the enforcement officials. So right off the bat we wanted to make these things clearer so that to the extent we had some rules, lawyers knew what standard they were going to be held to.

So I just think right off the bat that that’s an important issue to make it clear, that we worked on making the rules clear, and I think that’s a major thing right there. We tried to clearly distinguish between direct and indirect advertising, and we tried to really protect the public with some of the things we’ve done.

And again, I think there’ll be a lot of more give-and-take probably as we go forward. But Tom, you want to give some more specifics than I have?

CASEY: I’ll go through, if you want, and give you some specific changes that we made.

In Rule 7.1, which deals with communications concerning lawyers’ services, I have four principal changes that I think we made.

Under the proposed rule, results-obtained advertising refers to the type of thing where - seen in advertising - that I have achieved $14 million verdicts in my career, that sort of thing. We have a restriction on that type of advertising that requires a conspicuous disclosure that suggests that past results afford no guarantee on future results. Every case is different and must be judged on its own merits. That was very much of a compromise proposal.

There’s also in 7.1 a restriction on advertising for a specific type of case concerning which the lawyer has neither experience or competence. Hotly debated proposal. And we consciously did not attempt to define what is meant by neither experience nor competence.

It may speak for itself, but it goes to the situation where, for example, an individual will advertise for a medical malpractice cerebral palsy baby case, when, in fact, that individual is right out of law school, has never seen a malpractice case, has no experience with malpractice cases, no experience with that type of case. And that was perhaps the most controversial provision that was passed, and it was controversial because arguably any rookie lawyer right out of school by the virtue of the fact that he is licensed to practice law in the state of Missouri is capable of performing on any type of a case, however complex.

And I think the distinction is that we tried to make or is implicit here is the distinction that handling a matter about which you have little or no competency or experience is one thing, and advertising for such a case is another thing. And by advertising, implicitly you’re making a statement to the public about that.

Another change refers to a restriction on advertising lawyers who advertise for a particular type of case when it is their custom if they get certain a case to refer those matters out to other lawyers. And we say that you can’t do that without conspicuously identifying the fact that, If I get such a case, I’m going to refer it to another lawyer.