Significant Victory on Appeal

With Joe Lanni at the helm, our medical malpractice legal team scored a major victory for a client.

In a First Department appeal, the Court permitted claims for punitive damages in a medical malpractice case to stand against a physician and hospital system for being complicit in a concurrent surgeries scheme whereby an unsupervised resident performed an operation on the plaintiff without his knowledge and consent.

The operation, aside from being nonconsensual, also resulted in substantial injuries to the plaintiff. The plaintiff's attending physician was in another operating room performing surgery on a different patient while the resident was operating on the client. The appellate decision affirmed a lower court ruling in the case that held punitive damages were appropriate because the defendants' conduct constituted "gross indifference to patient care."