Medical Malpractice

Keith A. Hebeisen and Sarah F. King, attorneys at Clifford Law Offices, obtained a $7.4 million settlement on behalf of a young man paralyzed from the waist down following the neurosurgeon’s decision to deviate from an established spinal cyst drainage procedure without the patient’s consent. Kelvin Kakazu, 38, awoke from surgery on July 20, 2013 without feeling in his feet or legs. Video produced during discovery revealed that the neurosurgeon had cauterized and cut a…

Keith A. Hebeisen and Sarah F. King, attorneys at Clifford Law Offices, obtained an $8.5 million settlement on behalf of a mother who died after childbirth at Stroger Hospital following the medical team’s failure to recognize and treat signs and symptoms of ongoing bleeding from a placental abruption. Leticia Lara, 38, died Nov. 28, 2013, following the delivery of her child. On the day of delivery, she had an increased heart rate and decreased blood…

A study by the Leapfrog Group – a nonprofit watchdog organization that assesses patient safety at acute care hospitals throughout the US – released their biannual report for Spring 2019. Illinois dropped to No. 14, one spot below last year’s report. Of the 42 Illinois hospitals assessed for patient safety, a few of them dropped to a B, thus pulling the ranking of the state down one spot. View the grades for all Illinois hospitals…

Susan Capra, a partner at Clifford Law Offices in Chicago, answers common medical malpractice questions. Susan is also a registered nurse and has combined her medical knowledge with her legal education to help those who have been injured by healthcare professionals. She understands all that it takes to put together a successful medical malpractice case because these matters are highly complex. What is medical malpractice? Susan: Medical malpractice is a cause of action for damages…

USA Today reported on how “Hospitals know how to protect mothers. They just aren’t doing it” in a weekend story entitled “Deadly Deliveries.” In a cover story of July 27-29, 2018, reporter Alison Young and a team of contributors wrote of how they examined more than half-million pages of internal hospital quality records obtained through federally funded programs and the deliveries of 150 women at hospitals where “deliveries went terribly wrong.” Their findings resulted in…

The birth of a child certainly is one of the most significant events for a family, but all of those hopes are ruined for hundreds of people following two fertility clinics destroying frozen embryos when the liquid nitrogen tanks thawed in March. Imagine women with uterine cancer who counted on those stored embryos to be their only hope for a family. Or those aging women who paid medical professionals assuring them that they would be…

Bradley M. Cosgrove, partner at Clifford Law Offices, obtained a $3 million verdict on behalf of a 52-year-old man who died from a pulmonary embolism 50 days after undergoing leg surgery at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital. The case involved Edward A. Smolinski of Elmhurst who died when doctors failed to prevent, diagnose and treat a pulmonary embolus following surgery to repair a quadriceps tendon in his left leg. The case was brought by his wife Margaret…

An alarming statistic released on January 15th 2017 stated that about two percent of all doctors are involved in half of all medical malpractice settlements, according to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) that has studied this issue for the past 25 years. The NPDB reported that these settlements represented a total of more than $41 billion. At the same time, however, it was reported that only a small percentage of those reporting to this…

Bob Clifford resumed writing a column for the newly redesigned Chicago Lawyer publication that has a subscription base of thousands of lawyers. In Clifford’s latest column he goes into depth about medical errors and how the CDC does not allow physicians, medical examiners, coroners and funeral directors to list medical error as a cause of death. Martin Makary, an American surgeon, has asked the CDC to list medical errors as the third most common cause…