Latest / Statutes & Stethoscopes | Trial Lessons for Medical Injury Lawyers / This Overlooked Evidence Can Turn Rejected Nursing Home Cases Into Wins | Ep. 3

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This Overlooked Evidence Can Turn Rejected Nursing Home Cases Into Wins | Ep. 3 · Statutes & Stethoscopes | Trial Lessons for Medical Injury Lawyers

0:00
Jamie Anzalone: A lot of people would say, well, they're 90 years old, 95 years old, they have outlived their life expectancy.
0:06
Jamie Anzalone: What wh why even take a case like this?
0:07
Jamie Anzalone: And now you get this very rewarding feeling that you're taking cases that a lot of attorneys don't want to take.
0:13
Tracy Liberatore: That's Jamie Anzelone, a board-certified civil trial lawyer and founding partner of Anzalone and Doyle trial lawyers.
0:20
Tracy Liberatore: While many attorneys hesitate to take nursing home neglect cases involving elderly victims, Jamie has built his practice around uncovering negligence, identifying overlooked damages, and pursuing justice for families others might turn away.
0:33
Jamie Anzalone: If you are going to reject the case just because the DOH found that nothing was worth sanctioning, I think that you'd be making a big mistake.
0:41
Tracy Liberatore: In this episode, you'll learn how to identify nursing home negligence even when regulators find no violations, how to challenge arbitration agreements that prevent cases from reaching a jury, and how to build compelling damages claims for elderly clients that other attorneys might overlook.
0:57
Tracy Liberatore: I'm your host, Tracy LiVertori.
0:59
Tracy Liberatore: Let's get into today's conversation.
1:03
Tracy Liberatore: So, Jamie, why nursing homework?
1:06
Jamie Anzalone: Well, Tracy, it's pretty funny that you asked this today and we're on this podcast because I literally just got out of a nursing home mediation.
1:15
Jamie Anzalone: And it's funny, I was telling a story in this nursing home mediation because the the group we were we were going against in this case, and I will, of course, won't name them, was one of the groups I first went against 10 years ago when we first started doing nursing homework.
1:30
Jamie Anzalone: And apparently, this is only the second claim this particular nursing home has ever had against it.
1:35
Jamie Anzalone: The first being the one I doubled against them 10 years ago and the one.
1:38
Jamie Anzalone: And the amount that I've learned in the last 10 years is incredible.
1:43
Jamie Anzalone: And I think why nursing home work then is honestly the same answer as to why nursing home work today.
1:51
Jamie Anzalone: And the answer is pretty simple.
1:53
Jamie Anzalone: First, this is a very forgotten about part of our population.
1:59
Jamie Anzalone: Elderly folks in nursing homes.
2:02
Jamie Anzalone: And there's a lot of folks that are in there that their kids that were taking care of them undergo tremendous guilt in having to put their mom or dad in a nursing home.
2:13
Jamie Anzalone: It's something that's crippling to them at times.
2:15
Jamie Anzalone: And then only to learn that something went wrong and they really do blame themselves.
2:20
Jamie Anzalone: And then, you know, this population really can't fight for themselves.
2:25
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, they can't even, you know, they can't take care of themselves at home.
2:28
Jamie Anzalone: Their kids can't even take care of them.
2:30
Jamie Anzalone: And now here they are being uh whereas they're asking these facilities to take care of them.
2:35
Jamie Anzalone: And, you know, look at by and large, there's a lot of great care out there.
2:38
Jamie Anzalone: Uh people who are CNAs and nurses and nutritionists and dietitians at these places, they they they are saintly uh in certain moments and certain places.
2:49
Jamie Anzalone: But unfortunately, we see some really bad care.
2:52
Jamie Anzalone: Uh and especially when you see uh families that, you know, unfortunately don't go in and see the moms and dads enough, you kind of see even worse care.
3:02
Jamie Anzalone: And then it comes to fruition that something really bad happened, whether it be a bed sore because they weren't being turned and repositioned, whether they fell because the fall intervention guidelines weren't followed, whatever it may be.
3:15
Jamie Anzalone: You know, you look at that case, and a lot of people would say, well, they're 90 years old, 95 years old, they have outlived their life expectancy.
3:23
Jamie Anzalone: What why even take a case like this?
3:24
Jamie Anzalone: The damages aren't there.
3:26
Jamie Anzalone: We started taking a lot of this work 10 years ago or so and creating damages and and and bringing these people's stories to life because they are forgotten about.
3:38
Jamie Anzalone: And the more and more you focus group cases like this and try these cases to verdict, you see that jurors and and the public, they haven't forgotten about this part of our population.
3:48
Jamie Anzalone: In fact, they sympathize greatly with them.
3:51
Jamie Anzalone: And you start coming to light with all these terrible things that are happening, and then you're giving life to people that are not able to protect themselves.
3:59
Jamie Anzalone: And now you get this very rewarding feeling that you know you're taking cases that a lot of attorneys don't want to take, and you're breathing life into these people and to these families that were forgotten about and not taken care of.
4:13
Jamie Anzalone: And I just settled this case just 10 minutes ago.
4:17
Jamie Anzalone: And honestly, I have the same rewarding feeling from this for this 95-year-old woman who passed away in a nursing home as I did for the 90-year-old woman that I represented 10 years ago against that same nursing home.
4:29
Jamie Anzalone: I'm happy that feeling hasn't left me.
4:32
Jamie Anzalone: And so it's still rewarding.
4:34
Jamie Anzalone: I remember that case I settled 10 years ago having this wonderful kind of hug and and good feeling and good moment with them when the case was resolved.
4:44
Jamie Anzalone: It was on behalf of their mom that was a daughter.
4:46
Jamie Anzalone: And today it was two daughters that were 69 and 71.
4:50
Jamie Anzalone: And it was that same rewarding feeling they said, well, you went to bat for us when no one else really would.
4:56
Jamie Anzalone: And that still feels good to this day.
4:59
Jamie Anzalone: And I know we're doing, I know we're doing good work on behalf of these people to hold uh nursing homes accountable.
5:06
Tracy Liberatore: So that was your first nursing home case then, and that feeling really is what kind of philosophy do you want to keep going?
5:11
Jamie Anzalone: Yeah, because you know, you you're dealing again, you're dealing with typically very good clients who are doing the responsible thing by getting their family member into a nursing home.
5:21
Jamie Anzalone: You know, that's not an easy choice, right?
5:23
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, that's not just like, you know, dropping your dog off at a kennel.
5:27
Jamie Anzalone: This is a very, very hard, hard decision.
5:31
Jamie Anzalone: Yeah.
5:31
Jamie Anzalone: And, you know, look at it's the right decision.
5:34
Jamie Anzalone: Most people don't have the financial needs to say, oh, we'll just get home health care, we'll get the best care, bring them into the house, mom and dad can live with us.
5:41
Jamie Anzalone: That's not reality.
5:42
Jamie Anzalone: The reality is it's they they care for their parents in their own homes for years.
5:46
Jamie Anzalone: And then it comes a point in time and they say, well, I can't do this anymore.
5:50
Jamie Anzalone: And this is a really, really hard decision.
5:52
Jamie Anzalone: And they and you could hear these people tell their stories about we went to 10 different nursing homes and we finally picked one.
5:59
Jamie Anzalone: And then that one betrayed us.
6:02
Tracy Liberatore: Yeah.
6:02
Jamie Anzalone: And then to see those cases through to the end, jury verdict or settlement is still a very rewarding feeling, and it's the right thing to do.
6:10
Tracy Liberatore: And I think um a lot of the people we talk to, sometimes we get the calls as well, it's the the families are angry because there's dignity issues there too in a lot of these cases.
6:21
Tracy Liberatore: You know, they feel like their their loved one is not being taken care of and they're you know violated in a way.
6:27
Jamie Anzalone: You know, and then sometimes I think that everybody focuses on, well, what's the you know, what's the actionable part of these cases?
6:34
Jamie Anzalone: Um, you know, unfortunately, you're not gonna always bring a claim because someone's diaper wasn't changed one day, as angry as that would make you, or because their food was cold, or because you know they had a scratch on their arm that wasn't there the day before.
6:48
Jamie Anzalone: Unfortunately, those you know, kind of single item issues don't have, they really don't have enough damages to justify bringing a claim.
6:56
Jamie Anzalone: But when you do have the big event, the fall, you know, with with a broken bone, or you have a bed sore uh that it takes months to heal or or goes septic or whatever, if you have that one kind of really bad area, there's no reason why when you're bringing that claim, you can't throw everything else in because it's showing a pattern of betrayal and neglect.
7:19
Jamie Anzalone: And that's where we see that a lot.
7:21
Jamie Anzalone: A lot of times in our complaints, not only will we talk about the big event that went wrong, but we talk about the general bedside manner and and all of the issues that that person was having in connection with the big event.
7:32
Tracy Liberatore: How do you decide whether or not to take a case then?
7:35
Jamie Anzalone: When you're dealing with nursing home cases for people that are, you know, not working anymore, right?
7:41
Jamie Anzalone: They're 80 years old, 90 years old, even those that are in their 70s are not working at the nursing home for a reason.
7:47
Jamie Anzalone: They're they're disabled in some manner.
7:49
Jamie Anzalone: You know, you don't have any cases that have loss of wage.
7:52
Jamie Anzalone: And other than some, you know, past medical bills, right, with a Medicare lien or, you know, uh Medicaid lien, it's a lot of times rare that you even have a future medical bill claim because unfortunately the person's passed away.
8:08
Jamie Anzalone: Or, you know, they've already gotten the care they're gonna need and they they don't really need much more.
8:12
Jamie Anzalone: They're just living with this horrible injury.
8:14
Jamie Anzalone: So obviously to take a case, we have to calculate the damages and to figure out, you know, what they are.
8:21
Jamie Anzalone: And I think that the best way to look at it is just to just to quickly rehash the PA law.
8:26
Jamie Anzalone: And that is that, you know, if we have a living plaintiff, you know, someone who fell on a nursing home, fractured their hip, and they're still living, well, that person's usually not coming to see us.
8:35
Jamie Anzalone: It's usually their son or their daughter, or sometimes the power of attorney for them.
8:39
Jamie Anzalone: And how we're calculating damages is we're getting an idea of what we think their non-economic damages are.
8:46
Jamie Anzalone: So the that person who's still living with the broken bone and the hardware and implanted or whatever it may be, their pain and suffering, their mental anguish, their loss of enjoyment of whatever life they have left in the nursing home, their disfigurement, their scarring.
9:03
Jamie Anzalone: And as we know in Pennsylvania, these are non-economic damages that a jury has to come up with a figure on.
9:09
Jamie Anzalone: We can't suggest the number.
9:11
Jamie Anzalone: But if you do enough of this work, you kind of get a sense on what the marketplace value of that is and what the cases can settle for.
9:17
Jamie Anzalone: If we have a case involving a death, we have to figure out was the death caused by the negligence?
9:22
Jamie Anzalone: If it was caused by the negligence, then you have a wrongful death recovery for whichever family members are alive, whether it be a spouse or their children.
9:32
Jamie Anzalone: Most times they're grown children, so you have to figure out what those claims may be worth for the children's grief loss of the parent or the spouse's grief loss of the spouse.
9:41
Jamie Anzalone: So that's the wrongful death recovery.
9:43
Jamie Anzalone: But then even if the death wasn't caused by the negligence, you have the survival part of the case.
9:48
Jamie Anzalone: So the pain and suffering and those non-economic damages we talked about earlier, what those damages may be worth in the person's survival claim, which is that time period between the injury, so a fall in this case, and the time of death.
10:03
Jamie Anzalone: And that could be two years.
10:05
Jamie Anzalone: It could be a month.
10:07
Jamie Anzalone: Uh, and it may not have caused the death, but it's a time period that there's pain and suffering.
10:11
Jamie Anzalone: So we do enough of it.
10:12
Jamie Anzalone: We know what the cases are valued at typically.
10:16
Jamie Anzalone: That's kind of a good start as to calculating your damages.
10:19
Jamie Anzalone: The unknown in all these cases, and this is why you can't take a nursing home case and just settle it like you would maybe a car crash case with State Farm or Progressive before you have to file a lawsuit.
10:30
Jamie Anzalone: And nursing home work, once you start getting in and doing the discovery, you start figuring out is there a roadway or a pathway to punitive damages?
10:40
Jamie Anzalone: And that gets you into a whole nother stratosphere on the damage value of a case like that.
10:45
Jamie Anzalone: Uh, and sometimes when we get the cases originally, we know that there's going to be punitives.
10:49
Jamie Anzalone: It's just a question of how bad the conduct is that we find.
10:52
Jamie Anzalone: Um, so I think that's kind of the general, you know, outline of the cases.
10:56
Jamie Anzalone: So I'm not saying you need to have all those, but you have to have categories that amount to something that's when it makes sense for the client, because you can't do a nursing home case with at least a nursing expert.
11:09
Jamie Anzalone: Right.
11:09
Jamie Anzalone: So you know that's going to be upfront cost.
11:11
Jamie Anzalone: You know there's going to be a lien of some sort with Medicare or Medicaid.
11:15
Jamie Anzalone: So, you know, very difficult to look at a case and say, oh, well, case value is $25,000 or $50,000.
11:22
Jamie Anzalone: That makes sense for you to take that, you know, son or daughter.
11:25
Jamie Anzalone: Sometimes just financially, economically, it doesn't.
11:28
Jamie Anzalone: Uh so there has to be some some value, not not crazy substantial value, but significant value to justify moving forward with these cases.
11:37
Tracy Liberatore: And earlier you said you sometimes had to get creative with the damages.
11:41
Tracy Liberatore: Um, what's the most creative you have ever had to get with the damages?
11:45
Tracy Liberatore: What would what would that look like?
11:46
Jamie Anzalone: Let's do it this way.
11:47
Jamie Anzalone: You have a client, here comes the case to you.
11:49
Jamie Anzalone: You have a client who gets transferred by ambulance.
11:53
Jamie Anzalone: Not really a nursing home case, but I think this is applicable.
11:56
Jamie Anzalone: And the client is going to the hospital for a UTI.
12:00
Jamie Anzalone: But during the transfer, they don't strap her foot in and she fractures her femur.
12:06
Jamie Anzalone: And then in the hospital, she passes away three days later and she's 96.
12:11
Jamie Anzalone: I would say a lot of lawyers, not most, but a lot of lawyers will look at that and say, Where are we going there?
12:18
Jamie Anzalone: There's no hardly any survival damages whatsoever, uh, because the the pain and suffering is is days.
12:24
Jamie Anzalone: Wrongful death, you know, she's has maybe one or two children and they're you know in their 70s, right?
12:32
Jamie Anzalone: So how do you get creative to kind of build that case, right?
12:38
Jamie Anzalone: Oh, and the standard against uh an ambulance company is gross negligence.
12:42
Jamie Anzalone: So again, how you get creative is is building the story, right?
12:47
Jamie Anzalone: Meeting the family, uh finding out, you know, what was mom like right before she got this UTI and had to go to the hospital.
12:56
Jamie Anzalone: What kind of shows did you guys watch?
12:59
Jamie Anzalone: What did you do that week?
13:00
Jamie Anzalone: Tell us about that week leading up to it.
13:02
Jamie Anzalone: And you learn that they were watching Wheel of Fortune, they went to dinner, they did this, that, and the other thing.
13:08
Jamie Anzalone: That would be no different than somebody who's doing that in their 60s.
13:12
Jamie Anzalone: And you say, Well, what kind of grief loss do you have?
13:15
Jamie Anzalone: Your mom's 96.
13:16
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, you were so lucky to have her for all those years.
13:19
Jamie Anzalone: Well, actually, it gets harder to lose somebody when they're 96 because it's a part of your life.
13:25
Jamie Anzalone: This woman lived with her daughter.
13:27
Jamie Anzalone: It was a part of their life for so long, a mainstay.
13:30
Jamie Anzalone: And that woman was healthy.
13:32
Jamie Anzalone: That woman was nothing was wrong with her.
13:35
Jamie Anzalone: And then she had a little infection that required to go to the hospital.
13:39
Jamie Anzalone: But on her way there, she gets this fracture, which was the result of gross negligence because they didn't strap her in correctly.
13:45
Jamie Anzalone: And now we say to the ambulance company, this was a major, major blow to this family.
13:51
Jamie Anzalone: And yeah, she outlived her life expectancy, but they did everything together every single day of the week.
13:59
Jamie Anzalone: And so the create the creativity in a case like that is not even being creative, it's just doing good good work and getting to know your client.
14:09
Jamie Anzalone: Find out everything they did in the week before the death and everything they did in the month before the death.
14:14
Jamie Anzalone: How close is the relationship?
14:16
Jamie Anzalone: And then you can start building your damage against that ambulance company for someone who's 96 years old, right?
14:24
Jamie Anzalone: Outlive their life expectancy by a lot.
14:27
Jamie Anzalone: And you now have a wrongful death recovery for a 70-year-old and a survival damage for two days.
14:34
Jamie Anzalone: And I won't tell you what we settled that case for, but I could promise you that was a lot more than someone who just got hit in a, you know, kind of a whiplash car accident.
14:41
Jamie Anzalone: It was it was a significant number.
14:43
Jamie Anzalone: But it takes being creative and and and getting to know your clients and and building the cases.
14:48
Tracy Liberatore: No, absolutely.
14:48
Tracy Liberatore: And I think that's the really the art of the practice of law, and I think that kind of really makes you stand out from, you know, the attorneys that out there that aren't doing that, you know, that don't get to know their clients in that way.
15:00
Tracy Liberatore: So you mentioned um use of experts.
15:04
Tracy Liberatore: So let's let's segue into that.
15:06
Tracy Liberatore: What types of expert do you typically use and what's most important for you when you're looking for a medical expert for the maybe, you know, medical people out there that are looking to become experts?
15:16
Tracy Liberatore: What's some things they need to think about when they're trying to become an expert?
15:19
Tracy Liberatore: What's important to you as a trial lawyer when you're hiring an expert?
16:14
Jamie Anzalone: I would say the reason nursing homework may be more appealing than people think it is, two reasons.
16:20
Jamie Anzalone: One, I do a lot of truck work, and I consider nursing homework to be a truck case without the wheels.
16:26
Jamie Anzalone: The reason for that is the nursing home industry is heavily, heavily regulated by the Fed.
16:32
Jamie Anzalone: Right?
16:32
Jamie Anzalone: There's all sorts of F tags that talk about the minimum standards that require, that are required for care, and they there's lots of them.
16:40
Jamie Anzalone: Uh there's requirements on staffing, there's requirements on the way the activities of daily living are tracked, there's requirements on documentation.
16:49
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, a nursing home chart is overwhelming to someone who doesn't do it, but once you do a lot of it, you can look through it very quickly and figure out where the problems are with that nursing home.
16:59
Jamie Anzalone: Just like if you're a truck attorney and you do a lot of truck work, you can look through the employment application and uh the uh uh the logging and the electronic downloads and everything to figure out where the violations are.
17:12
Jamie Anzalone: So that's the first thing I love about nursing homework is that is that heavy regulation that you can make the cases very rule-based.
17:20
Jamie Anzalone: Right.
17:21
Jamie Anzalone: And that's why a lot of trucking cases, when you dig into it, are appealable to jurors because they say, well, this guy's supposed to be abiding by this set of rules, which is different than car drivers, and he's breaking them.
17:32
Jamie Anzalone: Nursing homes are supposed to be abiding by this set of rules that's heavily regulated, and they're breaking them.
17:39
Jamie Anzalone: A little different than a medical malpractice case where you have a doctor who goes in and there's a standard of care, but so much of it is in the doctor's judgment.
17:47
unknown: Yeah.
17:48
Jamie Anzalone: The way a nursing home can be run is not in judgment.
17:50
Jamie Anzalone: It is what it is.
17:51
Jamie Anzalone: That's such a ridiculous expression, but it is.
17:54
Jamie Anzalone: There's no, oh, well, you know, um, we should only have to turn them, you know, you know, once every five hours.
18:00
Jamie Anzalone: No, the standard that it is regulated that when this person has this type of bed store, it's every two hours, period.
18:07
Jamie Anzalone: Right.
18:07
Jamie Anzalone: Or they need to have their meals at this time, or they need to be helped with, you know, assistance according to this reg.
18:14
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, it's it's very regulated, very rule-based.
18:17
Jamie Anzalone: So with that, you know, you can you can get into nursing homework and it's it's a little overwhelming because there's a lot of that stuff, but once you learn it, it's not that overwhelming.
18:28
Jamie Anzalone: The second part about nursing homework that's appealing is, and I don't want anybody to take this the wrong way, but the costs are not like they are medical malpractice cases.
18:37
Jamie Anzalone: If you are stealing a neurosurgeon or a neurologist uh or a hospital system, you have to be ready with an army.
18:45
Jamie Anzalone: Um, you know, you need neurologists, you need uh fourth certified neurosurgeons, and every one of those experts, and as they should be, because there's they're they're just at another level, are so expensive.
18:56
Jamie Anzalone: And you have to because you know the defense is going to do the same thing.
18:59
Jamie Anzalone: In the nursing home world, it's a little bit more streamlined, and your cases typically uh are defended uh on the on the defense side and on the plaintiff side by nurses.
19:09
Jamie Anzalone: And nurses are so helpful, but they aren't the same costs as a neurosurgeon and a medical malpractice case.
19:16
Jamie Anzalone: They just aren't.
19:17
Jamie Anzalone: I hate to say this, and I don't want to be paying more.
19:19
Jamie Anzalone: They probably should be because their reports are so much more detailed than I get sometimes in medical malpractice cases.
19:24
Jamie Anzalone: They're so on top of their kids.
19:27
Jamie Anzalone: They know the game so well as to what nursing ones are supposed to be doing and not doing.
19:31
Jamie Anzalone: But in any event, it's just not that same cost.
19:33
Jamie Anzalone: They don't carry that same cost with them.
19:35
Jamie Anzalone: So always a nursing expert, and and it depends obviously on what type of case you have, how specialized within the nursing field you want to get.
19:43
Jamie Anzalone: You know, in a bed sore case, I'm never handling one unless I have a uh wound uh care certified nurse.
19:50
Jamie Anzalone: Matter of fact, we have a nurse on staff in our office who is wound care certified.
19:54
Jamie Anzalone: Uh, I couldn't use her, of course, to testify, but I need that kind of knowledge on somebody uh to be running a bed sore case.
20:02
Jamie Anzalone: But so, you know, bed sore case, definitely a wound care certified nurse.
20:05
Jamie Anzalone: But any other regular cases, medication mix-ups, assaults on patients, fall cases, uh, a nurse, a registered nurse who, of course, has a good background in the nursing home field, which is different.
20:17
Jamie Anzalone: It's just different than, say, in the hospital system field, someone who's been a director of nursing, someone who has been an administrator, perhaps, someone who just knows that field inside and out.
20:27
Jamie Anzalone: So that's always one of the experts I'd get.
20:30
Jamie Anzalone: The other expert I would get, especially if we're having uh to prove that the fall or the injury caused the death, uh, I always want to have a geriatrician to uh talk about the cause of death.
20:40
Jamie Anzalone: I don't think the geriatrician needs to have any crazy specialties, say a neurosurgery, if you got a brain injury or you know an orthopedics, if you have an orthopedic injury leading to death.
20:49
Jamie Anzalone: A good geriatrician, internist, someone who's been a hospitalist who's signed, you know, tons of death certificates, that's kind of the second expert.
20:59
Jamie Anzalone: That's really what I would typically go with.
21:01
Jamie Anzalone: If we get into a staffing case where we think that they're understaffed, we think that they're really cheating the system.
21:09
Jamie Anzalone: Um, I'm probably gonna want to have some type of expert that has managed nursing homes as an administrator or has been in the administration part of things because you're gonna need someone to comment if you're c if you're going into that area, which is very regulation heavy, very administration heavy, uh, you need an expert that may not even be a nurse.
21:29
Jamie Anzalone: It's probably gonna be someone like a hospital administrator and nursing home administrator.
21:33
Tracy Liberatore: Sure.
21:34
Tracy Liberatore: And I think that's a very good point because I think there's a lot of confusion in that the administrative versus the director of nursing.
21:40
Tracy Liberatore: So one is a nurse and one is an administrator, not necessarily both the same.
21:45
Tracy Liberatore: How about the Department of Health?
21:47
Tracy Liberatore: You know, if they don't go in and cite the nursing home, is there still possibility for the case or is that case out the window?
21:54
Jamie Anzalone: Yeah, you know, one thing I would tell people listening to this who who aren't lawyers, um, who've had things happen to their family, if something bad happens that doesn't smell right, report it to the Department of Health, like immediately.
22:07
Jamie Anzalone: Um, they take this stuff very, very seriously.
22:10
Jamie Anzalone: And you'll get a case manager, they may do an unannounced visit at the uh at the facility, and you can get some closure on whether or not you think something's wrong, and you can get some evidence back that you can use in your own, kind of just in your own light.
22:24
Jamie Anzalone: You have to lawsuit for the minute.
22:26
Jamie Anzalone: From the lawyering perspective, and I've had a lot of people refer me cases who have done this, and this is actually how I learned to do it myself.
22:34
Jamie Anzalone: You get a call from a client who says, you know, my mom just fell the other day.
22:40
Jamie Anzalone: Uh, I don't like what happened, it doesn't seem right.
22:42
Jamie Anzalone: And maybe we're not signing them up right away, because we just don't know if there's anything.
22:45
Jamie Anzalone: Maybe we're gonna set a client meeting in a week or whatever.
22:48
Jamie Anzalone: You tell that client, go to the department.
22:50
Jamie Anzalone: Department of Health and report what you're seeing.
22:53
Jamie Anzalone: Because in your own head, you think, well, just as a human being, you should report what you saw so that someone else doesn't have something bad happen to them.
23:02
Jamie Anzalone: But if this case turns into a lawsuit and there's significant damage and there's there's negligence, that is a piece of evidence that you can use in the case.
23:11
Jamie Anzalone: It may not necessarily get into court.
23:14
Jamie Anzalone: The judge may not allow it.
23:15
Jamie Anzalone: But it's something we can use in our case at some point as against the facility.
23:19
Jamie Anzalone: So, of course, positive Department of Health findings of fault and violations and them sanctioning the nursing home is super helpful because you can just go right to the nursing home and say, look, it you were cited.
23:34
Jamie Anzalone: Did you fight it?
23:35
Jamie Anzalone: Did you try to argue it?
23:37
Jamie Anzalone: Because they can appeal, they could appeal every every violation they get.
23:41
Jamie Anzalone: No, we didn't.
23:42
Jamie Anzalone: Why didn't you?
23:43
Jamie Anzalone: You know, and if you thought you were so right, why didn't you?
23:44
Jamie Anzalone: So you could kind of screw around with that and get some points with that.
23:47
Jamie Anzalone: But the bigger question, and this is the way you phrased it, was what happens if the DOH finds nothing was wrong?
23:54
Jamie Anzalone: We got a lot of these cases, right?
23:56
Jamie Anzalone: Where uh the clients say, you know, my mom fell and, you know, nobody was around, and she didn't have a bed alarm, and she broke her hip.
24:07
Jamie Anzalone: And we reported it to the Department of Health.
24:10
Jamie Anzalone: Department of Health does an unannounced visit, and they find that there's nothing worth citing the nursing home for.
24:18
Jamie Anzalone: Well, keep in mind that the Department of Health is not a nursing expert.
24:23
Jamie Anzalone: They're a regulatory body that comes in to see if something was really wrong and whether or not a violation or a sanction is necessary.
24:31
Jamie Anzalone: Kind of a high, a little bit of a higher standard.
24:34
Jamie Anzalone: Well, our job in law is to prove beyond the is to prove by the preponderance of the evidence that the standard of care was breached.
24:42
Jamie Anzalone: The Department of Health is not looking at a case in the same lens, through the same lens.
24:48
Jamie Anzalone: So don't get discouraged because the Department of Health didn't find anything.
24:52
Jamie Anzalone: Do your own research and figure out, was uh the fall preventable?
24:58
Jamie Anzalone: Well, you may have an inkling on your own if it is or not, but you you need an expert anyway to file the case.
25:04
Jamie Anzalone: So take a look at everything you get, look at the care plan, look at what the baseline is of that patient that's going in there, and figure out with your nurse whether or not everything was done properly.
25:16
Jamie Anzalone: I've had lots of cases where our nurses that are experts have found that there is no way they should have done what they've done.
25:24
Jamie Anzalone: And it's a breach of the standard of care because this woman's care plan said that she was supposed to have these fall preventions, but with that fall risk score that she had, she should have had a bed alarm.
25:39
Jamie Anzalone: Period.
25:39
Jamie Anzalone: That's the standard.
25:40
Jamie Anzalone: The Department of Health may miss that.
25:42
Jamie Anzalone: They don't do the type of review that we're gonna do with our experts.
25:45
Jamie Anzalone: So, you know, if you're ever going to reject the case just because the DOH found that nothing was worth sanctioning, uh I think that you'd be making a big mistake.
25:55
Tracy Liberatore: Okay.
25:55
Tracy Liberatore: And you have mentioned before, um, I guess I have the question.
26:00
Tracy Liberatore: So the nursing homes are supposed to report these things to the Department of Health at their certain level, right?
26:05
Tracy Liberatore: And so and then there's certain evidence that is or is not allowed, right, in in court or at trial, um, or at certain points in um the litigation, I guess, certain things are protected that they're not allowed in or out.
26:19
Tracy Liberatore: Um and so maybe, maybe just speaking to that a little bit about, you know, what things are maybe protected because they're they're doing them as remedial measures or whatever.
26:27
Tracy Liberatore: I mean, is that a thing that comes up at times?
26:31
Jamie Anzalone: Yes, actually, we tried a case to verdict about two years ago.
26:34
Jamie Anzalone: This was a huge point in the case.
26:36
Jamie Anzalone: So had a lady who was being transferred in a from a wheelchair to a shower chair, and in the process of doing so, she fell and broke her hip.
26:44
Jamie Anzalone: The CNA who was transferring her had her rest her hands on the lip of a tub that did not have a grab bar.
26:51
Jamie Anzalone: So right after this incident happened, way before we got involved, because the case got referred to us almost a year after the accident, the Department of Health comes in and cites the nursing home for not having a grab bar.
27:05
Jamie Anzalone: They pay a fine and they end up putting a grab bar in.
27:09
Jamie Anzalone: Okay.
27:10
Jamie Anzalone: So if you got rid of the Department of Health for just this example, in the law, we would call what the nursing home did by putting the grab bar in post-fall a subsequent remedial measure.
27:22
Jamie Anzalone: And typically, except for a few exceptions, and this wouldn't be one of them in this case, that's not allowed into court.
27:29
Jamie Anzalone: So if we were trying the case, it is not admissible that the nursing home made a remedial measure of putting a grab bar in.
27:37
Jamie Anzalone: That's the first thing.
27:38
Jamie Anzalone: The fact that they were cited by the Department of Health is not relevant because the Department of Health is, you know, no different than a police officer citing them for eating.
27:52
Jamie Anzalone: It's not, it's it's different standards of law that the jury needs to follow, different burdens of proof that we need to carry to show that somebody was negligent.
28:02
Jamie Anzalone: So there would be a fear that if the jury heard, oh, the Department of Health cited them for it, that that would be prejudicial and the jury would then say, oh, well, they must be negligent.
28:12
Jamie Anzalone: Because just because they didn't have the grab bar, just because they were cited for it and because they put it in after, that doesn't mean they were negligent in the first place for not having it.
28:22
Jamie Anzalone: So here is these two great pieces of evidence that we have that the judge says, you're not getting that in.
28:29
Jamie Anzalone: You are not getting it in because you're not getting, you know, it's just because the the DOH cited them for it, that's not that's prejudicial.
28:39
Jamie Anzalone: The jury has to make their own decision whether or not it's negligent to have not had a ground work.
28:43
Jamie Anzalone: And then also they put this in after the false hope to subsequent remedial measure.
28:46
Jamie Anzalone: And if you let all that kind of stuff in at trial, then companies may be, they may not want to make these subsequent remedial measures and it would discourage potential safety.
28:55
Jamie Anzalone: So that's why that rule is in play.
28:57
Jamie Anzalone: So in this case, how do you get around that?
28:59
Jamie Anzalone: Well, you get an expert who says what is right, and that is them not having the grab bar is a violation of Pennsylvania code, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
29:10
Jamie Anzalone: Period.
29:10
Jamie Anzalone: End of story, it is negligent.
29:12
Jamie Anzalone: So you prove it in different ways, right?
29:14
Jamie Anzalone: But it's annoying because these Department of Health findings, more often than not, are not coming in because of the fear that the jury would say, oh, well, the Department of Health side of them, they must be negligent.
29:26
Jamie Anzalone: But what I'll say is those Department of Health findings are very helpful because you can use them in your depositions to talk to the nurse and say, do you remember speaking to the Department of Health?
29:37
Jamie Anzalone: It says here that you did this on this date, but you just told me 10 minutes ago that you did something else.
29:43
Jamie Anzalone: How do you explain that?
29:44
Jamie Anzalone: So you can use that for impeaching these witnesses when they try to change their story when they told the Department of Health something else.
29:52
Tracy Liberatore: See, I love how creative your mind is with using all these things.
29:55
Tracy Liberatore: You end up getting them in in the end.
29:57
unknown: Yep.
29:58
Tracy Liberatore: Which leads me to my favorite thing to hear you speak on and these arbitration agreements and the amazing work that you and your firm have done with, you know, the work around getting these things, you know, sort of thrown out, I guess.
30:09
Tracy Liberatore: So I'd love to hear you speak on that a little bit.
30:11
Tracy Liberatore: You know, are they enforceable ins and outs of these arbitration agreements, how you get how you work around them?
30:17
Jamie Anzalone: Okay.
30:17
Jamie Anzalone: So it's crazy that this is actually bleeding into the health system now with hospitals arbitration agreements.
30:24
Jamie Anzalone: But let's let's kind of give a little uh description on what's going on here in the nursing home industry first.
30:29
Jamie Anzalone: So, first, before I start this topic, I have to give tremendous kudos to my partner, Kelly Saravalo, who has kind of made it her mission in this office to beat as many arbitration clauses uh in nursing home admission packets as possible.
30:45
Jamie Anzalone: And she's done a great job of it.
30:47
Jamie Anzalone: And we've really, we've really hammered this.
30:49
Jamie Anzalone: And the reason we do it is because let's go back to why nursing homes even have them in the first place.
30:55
Jamie Anzalone: So typically you get admitted to a nursing home.
30:57
Jamie Anzalone: Uh, whoever you know gets you in there, it's usually your son or your daughter, right?
31:02
Jamie Anzalone: They're given a packet of information that is about this thick.
31:08
Jamie Anzalone: Within it is an admission agreement regarding arbitration.
31:13
Jamie Anzalone: And it says on the top, this is not a precondition to admission.
31:17
Jamie Anzalone: And then they tell you that if you were to sue the nursing home for whatever reason for personal injury damages, you have to go to arbitration as opposed to being able to have your case heard in front of a jury.
31:31
Jamie Anzalone: Now, it's sandwiched in the huge admission packet, which is like a hundred pages.
31:36
Jamie Anzalone: By law, they can't make it a precondition to admission.
31:40
Jamie Anzalone: So technically, someone can say, I'm not signing that, and they have to let you in the nursing home.
31:45
Jamie Anzalone: If you're a Medicare facility and you get Medicare dollars, you must put that heading on the top, not a precondition to admission.
31:53
Jamie Anzalone: I don't know a single client of mine who has signed one of these who said anyone ever even told them that it wasn't a precondition to admission or that they saw that on the top of the packet.
32:04
Jamie Anzalone: And do you know why they never see it?
32:06
Jamie Anzalone: Because, and I know this because we've taken the deposition of people who administer these agreements to our clients, they show it to them on an iPad and they just keep scrolling through and say, okay, well, here's the admission packet, here's this, sign this, sign this.
32:23
Jamie Anzalone: No one ever sees that hard paperwork.
32:26
Jamie Anzalone: And a lot of times in the arbitration agreements, there's a hard, there's a part of the paperwork that says, you uh have a right to have this looked at by a lawyer.
32:35
Jamie Anzalone: You can take a look at it with them.
32:37
Jamie Anzalone: You don't need to give us an answer right away.
32:39
Jamie Anzalone: We encourage you to do this, this, that, and the other thing.
32:42
Jamie Anzalone: And we've come to learn that none of that is ever really told to the people that are admitting their parents.
32:49
Jamie Anzalone: So just on a human level, we know this is going on, and that's why we think these agreements are garbage.
32:56
Jamie Anzalone: But that's really not enough to show that they're not enforceable.
33:00
Jamie Anzalone: Typically, you have to show that the person who is signing the arbitration agreement doesn't have the standing to bind the person who they're admitting.
33:11
Jamie Anzalone: So a lot of times we'll see power of attorneys do the signing.
33:15
Jamie Anzalone: Well, a lot of power of attorney agreements say this doesn't kick in until I am unable to make decisions for myself.
33:25
Jamie Anzalone: So we've met a lot of nursing home patients or clients who had no problems with competency whatsoever upon admission, and their son or their daughter just signs them in.
33:36
Jamie Anzalone: Well, we've routinely beat that by saying that that power of returning was not triggered.
33:42
Jamie Anzalone: So there was no authority to bind mom or dad because they were mentally competent.
33:47
Jamie Anzalone: So that's happened a lot.
33:48
Jamie Anzalone: A lot of other times, sons or daughters, and it's totally human nation, totally understandable.
33:54
Jamie Anzalone: They're not thinking about all this stuff.
33:56
Jamie Anzalone: They're thinking about getting mom into a nursing home because she just fractured her hip and she was at a hospital and now she has nowhere to go and we can't take care of her.
34:03
Jamie Anzalone: Sign whatever.
34:04
Jamie Anzalone: Run or daughter signs mom or dad in, and they're not even a power of attorney.
34:09
Jamie Anzalone: They have zero authority, and they're not doing anything wrong themselves, but they're just trying to get the ball moving.
34:15
Jamie Anzalone: So we would ask the nursing home after we filed a lawsuit to present to us the arbitration agreement that was signed.
34:22
Jamie Anzalone: And a lot of times it's signed by someone who has absolutely zero authority to buy them.
34:26
Jamie Anzalone: And then on the flip side of it, sometimes the patient who is completely incompetent, right?
34:33
Jamie Anzalone: Where they do, you know, BIMS scores on them and they're, you know, at three or two or four, which is, you know, as you know, severely cognitively impaired.
34:43
Jamie Anzalone: And they're the ones who are signing the admission agreement themselves.
34:47
Jamie Anzalone: So they're not competent to understand the agreement.
34:49
Jamie Anzalone: So, you know, those are just a few examples of how you beat them.
34:53
Jamie Anzalone: And we've beaten a lot of them.
34:55
Jamie Anzalone: And there's a good reason why you want to beat them.
34:58
Jamie Anzalone: Juries don't really like nursing homes.
35:01
Jamie Anzalone: They don't like the system that's been corporatized so much with outside of facilities and corporations taking over these places one by one.
35:08
Jamie Anzalone: A lot of jurors have had really bad experiences with nursing homes.
35:12
Jamie Anzalone: I'm sure there's a lot of great ones, but there's a lot of bad ones.
35:15
Jamie Anzalone: And the nursing homes know that.
35:18
Jamie Anzalone: And that's why they want to get as many arbitration agreements signed as possible, because now if you're a lawyer and you're looking at this case and you say, all right, well, the person who fell is in their 90s, damages may be limited.
35:31
Jamie Anzalone: Oh, and by the way, there's also an arbitration agreement.
35:34
Jamie Anzalone: So instead of having 12 of our, you know, of this person's peers, someone who could identify with the plaintiff's daughter or son to render this award one day, well, they're out of the picture.
35:45
Jamie Anzalone: Now you're gonna have to try your case in front of a mutually agreed upon judge or lawyer of someone who is just unfortunately not gonna have the same, you know, empathy uh that jurors do in these cases.
35:58
Jamie Anzalone: So very, very important.
36:00
Jamie Anzalone: It's bleeding over into the hospital stuff.
36:02
Jamie Anzalone: There's been a couple cases recently where people have uh had to sign agreements to say, if you're gonna get medical treatment here, sign this agreement.
36:11
Jamie Anzalone: It's an arbitration agreement.
36:12
Jamie Anzalone: They don't explain it.
36:13
Jamie Anzalone: And now they're locked in.
36:15
Jamie Anzalone: And there was one or two courts that have upheld that.
36:18
Jamie Anzalone: And so imagine, you know, you're being the victim of medical malpractice uh at an outpatient facility or you're in at a hospital and you signed your right-of-way to a potential jury trial.
36:28
Jamie Anzalone: Um, so you got to be really careful as to what's out there and what kind of rights you're giving up.
36:33
Tracy Liberatore: So that's why I think this is such an important topic, such an important issue for people to be aware of.
36:38
Tracy Liberatore: Um and I think one of the questions would be: what would you recommend for somebody that's going into a hospital then that has this agreement presented to them?
36:47
Tracy Liberatore: They don't know what they're signing.
36:48
Tracy Liberatore: And are they allowed to just say, I'm refusing to sign this and they still have to be cared for?
36:53
Tracy Liberatore: Would that be the same for the hospital and the nursing home?
36:55
Tracy Liberatore: And also, um, the other question popped into my head, I think that people would want to know is, you know, why is not knowing what you signed not enough?
37:04
Tracy Liberatore: If they're scanning through and you don't even get to see the disclosures, what's the point of the disclosure if you don't get to see it, you don't get you're not being informed and you're signing this stuff, you know, why is that not enough in the court size to get these things thrown out?
37:18
Jamie Anzalone: I guess the only way I can say to kind of hammer this home is to tell all of our viewers who may admit their parents into a nursing home, is to ask the nursing home administrator or the admissions person that they're that they're with, is there an arbitration agreement here?
37:34
Jamie Anzalone: If so, I won't be signing it.
37:36
Jamie Anzalone: And by law, that they cannot deny you admission, period.
37:40
Jamie Anzalone: End of story.
37:41
Jamie Anzalone: Again, with you not being able to see the agreements is as like, and I say as good as you should, because they're ripping through it on an iPad.
37:49
Jamie Anzalone: The only way to try to ensure that you're not giving up your parents' rights to a jury trial is to say, hey, I know I'm signing a bunch of stuff.
37:57
Jamie Anzalone: I want her my parent to get in here, but if there's an arbitration agreement, I am not signing it.
38:02
Jamie Anzalone: On the flip side with the hospital systems, I'm not really sure where that appears in the documents because it's so new.
38:08
Jamie Anzalone: Um I think, you know, you would have to maybe take the same approach.
38:14
Jamie Anzalone: I don't know if that's what we're gonna have to do now from now on.
38:16
Jamie Anzalone: You know, I mean, they tell you what you're signing, usually they'll say and we'll keep back.
38:19
Jamie Anzalone: Here's the HIPAA form, here's what you need to set, you know, sign to have this release to your family doctor.
38:25
Jamie Anzalone: And I think you ask, you know, is there an arbitration agreement here I'm signing?
38:29
Jamie Anzalone: Because if there is, I'm not signing it.
38:31
Jamie Anzalone: So I think that's the best I can do.
38:33
Jamie Anzalone: You know, it's best I can do it.
38:34
Tracy Liberatore: And if they if they refuse care based on that, then what do they have what do they do?
38:39
Jamie Anzalone: The law is that if you're a Medicare facility and every facility is, I mean, unless it's privately owned and you're only accepting private money, which is just doesn't happen anymore, uh, they have to have that that language that it's not a precondition to admission.
38:54
Tracy Liberatore: Have you found the nursing home starting to get smarter with these things at all, with these arbitration agreements?
38:59
Tracy Liberatore: Like, because you think you had said um either if the they're mentally not capable or the children are not power of attorney, have they started to look for and have you noticed any anything with that as you've been bringing these cases now?
39:12
Jamie Anzalone: No, I haven't really seen that.
39:13
Jamie Anzalone: All I can say is think of the amount of people that are admitted into nursing homes.
39:18
Jamie Anzalone: Think about the amount of lawsuits that are not brought.
39:22
Jamie Anzalone: True.
39:23
Jamie Anzalone: And think about the amount of attorneys that don't fight the arbitration agreements.
39:27
Jamie Anzalone: If a few slip through, if a f if a few really good nursing home lawyers throughout the state of let's just say Pennsylvania are wise enough to go after these agreements, it's such a small percentage that the nursing homes are going to say, what we don't need to do anything to change this.
39:44
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, so what?
39:45
Jamie Anzalone: A couple of them beat us in the arbitration agreements.
39:48
Jamie Anzalone: All I can say is I haven't seen any change in how they administer it uh for the last 10 years.
39:53
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, we've been doing nursing homework at least 10 years, and I haven't seen any change.
39:58
Jamie Anzalone: The only change that I've seen is the uh Medicare guideline that says if you, you know, this is not a precondition to admission.
40:06
Jamie Anzalone: Early on, say 10 years ago, they were, they didn't have that language up top.
40:11
Jamie Anzalone: I don't see them getting smarter.
40:12
Jamie Anzalone: I just see them getting quicker, you know, and just and just ripping through these agreements with people uh and getting them to sign them without them having a single idea of what it is that they're signing.
40:23
Tracy Liberatore: And so now I think we've kind of prepped our listeners.
40:27
Tracy Liberatore: How do you calculate those damages when your folks that you're representing are nearing the end of their life?
40:32
Jamie Anzalone: Well, I kind of alluded to it a little bit before, and again, I think it goes back to this creativity of the story, right?
40:38
Jamie Anzalone: So, for instance, today, this case I settled, this woman fell in a nursing home, cracked sugar hip, and died a month later.
40:47
Jamie Anzalone: She was 95 years young, grossly had outlived her life expectancy.
40:53
Jamie Anzalone: So you take that case and you say, well, what or what can you possibly do with this?
40:59
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, she sh the family's lucky to have had her, you know, for all these years.
41:04
Jamie Anzalone: So what's the wrongful death damage on on that?
41:07
Jamie Anzalone: And, you know, if you look through the medical records of a 95-year-old, there's going to be so many comorbidities, so many different medical conditions, that the defense is going to be able to say, with or without this fall, this woman was going to die in the next couple of months.
41:25
Jamie Anzalone: Okay.
41:26
Jamie Anzalone: So several key things that you need to do to get around that is say, I don't really care what the age is, right?
41:33
Jamie Anzalone: We can still build the damages when they're past their life expectancy.
41:38
Jamie Anzalone: So first they talk about a geriatrician.
41:40
Jamie Anzalone: So not only does your expert geriatrician need to relate that the fall caused the death, but they also need to give some idea of what the potential life expectancy from that point forward was without the fall.
41:57
Jamie Anzalone: And a good geriatrician who sees and treats geriatric patients into their 90s has the ability to do that.
42:05
Jamie Anzalone: So there's a lot of different key factors, you know, looking at their blood work.
42:09
Jamie Anzalone: You're going to have their family doctor records.
42:11
Jamie Anzalone: You're going to be able to see, you know, what the major diagnoses were.
42:15
Jamie Anzalone: You know, was there anything in there that while they all may have fatal and terminal, you know, consequences one day, is there anything in there to suggest that that was happening at the time of the fall?
42:26
Jamie Anzalone: The other thing is, and this happened in our case today, that was the defense's play.
42:31
Jamie Anzalone: They said, look at, yeah, okay, she fell at our facility.
42:34
Jamie Anzalone: Uh, but that didn't cause her to die because she died a month later.
42:38
Jamie Anzalone: She had many other things that were going to cause her to die.
42:41
Jamie Anzalone: I said, okay, well, let's look at your records that show you say she had great rehab potential.
42:48
Jamie Anzalone: You were sending her to physical therapy multiple times a week.
42:51
Jamie Anzalone: Well, why didn't you just put her on hospice?
42:54
Jamie Anzalone: If she's so bad, like you say, he was gonna die, and if she didn't fall, why isn't she in hospice?
43:01
Jamie Anzalone: Which means she has six months or less to live.
43:03
Jamie Anzalone: You know why?
43:05
Jamie Anzalone: Because two things are happening.
43:06
Jamie Anzalone: Either A, she wasn't ready to die, and you guys are just kind of talking out of both sides of your mouth, or B, you're just billing her family.
43:15
Jamie Anzalone: You're billing Medicare, and you say she's so bad, and if you really believe that, then why the hell are you sending her to physical therapy just to crank the build up?
43:25
Jamie Anzalone: So both of those answers are good for your case.
43:28
Jamie Anzalone: What now, however, I don't even need it to be answered.
43:30
Jamie Anzalone: I would say to a jury, I'd say they and then they tell you she was on death's door, and this fall, even though we dropped her, did not cause her to die.
43:40
Jamie Anzalone: I say, okay, well then why wasn't she on hospice?
43:43
Jamie Anzalone: They're the ones who can make that decision because she wasn't ready to die.
43:47
Jamie Anzalone: Or why were they sending her to therapy three times a week, getting her better if she's on death's door?
43:53
Jamie Anzalone: If she really was on death's door, then what they're doing is they're billing and it's fraudulent.
43:58
Jamie Anzalone: So that's how you can kind of get them coming and going when the argument is there's no damage here.
44:06
Jamie Anzalone: This woman outlived her life.
44:08
Jamie Anzalone: And with that, I I'll say it again.
44:11
Jamie Anzalone: Your argument is always you lost your mom at 96.
44:15
Jamie Anzalone: What a blessing.
44:17
Jamie Anzalone: And now you're asking this jury to award you grief damages for losing her at that age.
44:23
Jamie Anzalone: If God was going to give her another year, one more year, 365 days, and not being able to talk to your mother, who is such a major part of your life, is a damage.
44:35
Jamie Anzalone: And it is a grief damage.
44:37
Jamie Anzalone: And it's not the same grief for everybody, but if you had a daughter that was with her every day of her life, every day at the nursing home, to not have her for 365 more days is a damage.
44:50
Jamie Anzalone: And let a jury come up with it.
44:52
Jamie Anzalone: The right jurors may see that be a very big deal.
44:55
Jamie Anzalone: The wrong jurors may say, well, you know, you're you're on a money grab.
44:59
Jamie Anzalone: But if your client is a good client, a good juror is not going to, they're not going to penalize them that way.
45:06
Jamie Anzalone: So that's kind of my thing on outliving life expectancy and why these cases, someone's 95, still has a value.
45:14
Jamie Anzalone: Um, our oldest client that we ever settled a case for was 96 years old, and it was a good number was the ambulance case.
45:22
Jamie Anzalone: I'm dying to get a case resolved for someone who was 100.
45:26
Jamie Anzalone: The centurion hasn't happened yet.
45:29
Jamie Anzalone: I did look at a case for someone who was 102 who had a bed sore, but there was no negligence that caused it.
45:36
Jamie Anzalone: Uh, I think we can do it.
45:37
Jamie Anzalone: And um, you know, it just to show that the life expectancy means nothing.
45:43
Jamie Anzalone: A human life is a human life, period.
45:45
Tracy Liberatore: Well, it's absolutely true.
45:47
Tracy Liberatore: That one thing we can't get any more of is time, right?
45:50
Tracy Liberatore: We cannot get our time back.
45:51
Tracy Liberatore: We can get almost anything else, but the time, yeah.
45:54
Jamie Anzalone: For sure.
45:54
Jamie Anzalone: That's right.
45:55
Jamie Anzalone: There's a good line.
45:56
Jamie Anzalone: If I had more money, I'd buy more time.
45:58
Tracy Liberatore: That is the truth.
45:59
Tracy Liberatore: So I'd like to just talk a little bit now.
46:01
Tracy Liberatore: I mean, all this was such great, wonderful information, as always, Jamie.
46:05
Tracy Liberatore: Thank you.
46:06
Tracy Liberatore: Um, but let's talk a little bit about you.
46:08
Tracy Liberatore: Let's get to know you a little bit.
46:09
Tracy Liberatore: Tell us where you grew up.
46:10
Jamie Anzalone: I grew up, as did all my partners, um, right here in uh the Wyoming Valley, Northeast PA.
46:17
Jamie Anzalone: And uh that means a lot because, you know, we represent people from this community.
46:22
Jamie Anzalone: Um, and we are very proud to say that we have invested in this community over the years uh and continue to represent people from this area.
46:31
Jamie Anzalone: You know, there's a lot of people who, you know, go into different communities and they're not even from the state, right?
46:38
Jamie Anzalone: And we're very proud to be here and from here uh doing the work that we do here.
46:43
Tracy Liberatore: Your father was an attorney, right?
46:45
Jamie Anzalone: Yep, my dad.
46:46
Jamie Anzalone: So my dad started our firm in the early 90s.
46:49
Jamie Anzalone: Uh I came uh to start here in 2006, so not quite 20 years, but uh it'll be here before I know it.
46:57
Jamie Anzalone: Um and we were we were uh my dad, myself, and another attorney.
47:02
Jamie Anzalone: We were three attorney firm.
47:03
Jamie Anzalone: And uh we've built a team since I've been here.
47:08
Jamie Anzalone: Uh my dad uh hasn't really handled cases for a few years, and we built a team uh that I am very, very proud of.
47:16
Jamie Anzalone: Uh my partner, Pat Doyle, uh Kelly Ciro, my sister's out in Colorado.
47:21
Jamie Anzalone: And we've hired a number of other uh great attorneys, uh, Joe Price Jr., Steve Kopko, Aaron Decker, uh guys that are just uh running 100 miles an hour, um, handling a lot of cases and um doing it well.
47:36
Jamie Anzalone: And I'm just so happy and proud with the team that we've built here.
47:41
Jamie Anzalone: Uh and it took a great thing that my dad started and and I believe took it to the next level.
47:46
Tracy Liberatore: So that's how we talk about legacy, right?
47:49
Jamie Anzalone: Yeah, that's how we're going.
47:52
Tracy Liberatore: So your sister's also an attorney.
47:53
Tracy Liberatore: How about any other brother's sisters?
47:54
Tracy Liberatore: Is she your other sister?
47:56
Jamie Anzalone: My sister's 13 months younger than me.
47:58
Jamie Anzalone: She went to uh she followed me everywhere.
48:00
Jamie Anzalone: She went, I went to Lafayette College.
48:03
Jamie Anzalone: I played football there.
48:04
Jamie Anzalone: She came and she dove there.
48:06
Jamie Anzalone: Then I went to Dickinson Law School, she followed me there.
48:08
Jamie Anzalone: We lived together there.
48:10
Jamie Anzalone: And then I came and joined my dad's practice and she followed me here.
48:13
Jamie Anzalone: But then when she got here, she said, All right, I'm done following.
48:18
Jamie Anzalone: I want something different.
48:19
Jamie Anzalone: And she moved out to Colorado, and that was almost 15 years ago.
48:23
Jamie Anzalone: And she created her own practice out there.
48:25
Jamie Anzalone: Um, no, it's still Anselone Law Offices out there, it's not Anselone and Doyle, but she's very much affiliated with us and a partner of ours.
48:33
Jamie Anzalone: And she built this incredible practice out there, and she is a great trial lawyer and has tried a bunch of cases, the verdict, gotten several uh million and multimillion dollar awards.
48:44
Jamie Anzalone: She's just got an athlete's mind.
48:45
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, she's never gives up, never stops working, you know, uh, doesn't like to get told no very often, and you know, wins a lot of cases, which is great.
48:55
Jamie Anzalone: Other siblings, my brother is a forensic psychologist.
48:59
Jamie Anzalone: He's uh 50 in August, and he started our county's mental health court.
49:04
Jamie Anzalone: Uh, so for people that have uh, you know, certain mental illnesses um and have been convicted of a certain level of crime, they'll qualify for the court.
49:14
Jamie Anzalone: And it's saved the county millions of dollars uh in people who would be repeat offenders going to jail.
49:20
Jamie Anzalone: And he's you know helped them through the system and they graduate through his court.
49:24
Jamie Anzalone: So I'm very, very proud of the work that he's done.
49:27
Tracy Liberatore: Uh so you miss your sister when she left then your shadow.
49:31
Jamie Anzalone: Yeah, I met I did, but she's probably happy.
49:35
Jamie Anzalone: But she needed to fly and she did a great job.
49:38
Jamie Anzalone: Um I'm happy with the life and identity she's created out there, and it's fantastic.
49:44
Tracy Liberatore: Well, this was this was really great, Jamie.
49:46
Tracy Liberatore: And um, so tell us how people can get in contact with you if you're looking to, you know, get in touch.
49:51
Tracy Liberatore: Yeah.
49:52
Jamie Anzalone: All right.
49:52
Jamie Anzalone: Well, uh, we are in Wilkesbury, right on uh the corner of Northampton and South Franklin Street.
49:57
Jamie Anzalone: Uh we have an office in Pittston, we have an office in Bloomsburg.
50:01
Jamie Anzalone: Um, obviously, our website is probably the easiest way to figure out what the phone numbers are and the emails are and the submissions are and whatnot.
50:08
Jamie Anzalone: Facebook, um, we have a pretty good social media presence.
50:11
Jamie Anzalone: You could always, you know, message us on that.
50:13
Jamie Anzalone: And that's really it.
50:14
Jamie Anzalone: It's pretty simple these days.
50:15
Jamie Anzalone: I mean, you know, you know the name, you can find out anybody or how to get in contact with anybody.
50:20
Jamie Anzalone: I liked a lot about nursing homework today and medical malpractice, which we do a lot of, but we also do a lot of uh truck work and uh car siability and automobile crashes.
50:31
Jamie Anzalone: And I'll tell you this, and I and I'll leave you with this.
50:33
Jamie Anzalone: The thing we really pride ourselves in is seeing cases through beyond the courtroom and beyond a settlement.
50:41
Jamie Anzalone: It's like all the hard work goes into getting the case resolved.
50:45
Jamie Anzalone: And I think sometimes in our practice, it's over at that point.
50:50
Jamie Anzalone: Some people say, you know, well, I got you, you know, the settlement, I got the verdict, I'm done.
50:55
Jamie Anzalone: And I think we as lawyers have uh an obligation that's much greater than that.
50:59
Jamie Anzalone: And I think when you have the rare opportunity, I'm not saying with every case, but when you have the rare opportunities where someone has been left with horrible catastrophic injuries, and you've and you've done all the hard work to get them a sizable sum of money, I think it's on you a little to see that through with them, make sure they make the right financial decisions, make sure you could help them, you know, build a house that's that's proper for them.
51:25
Jamie Anzalone: You know, we have a lot of connections locally and throughout the state, and you have rare rare opportunities sometimes to literally put somebody's life back together after your case is done.
51:36
Jamie Anzalone: And you should use them.
51:37
Jamie Anzalone: You should use that power that you have uh in the rare case to uh really truly put somebody's life back to the best you you're able to.
51:46
Jamie Anzalone: You can never make it the way it was before the incident, but get them back to the new normal the best you can uh and don't just say, all right, here's your check, have a nice life, I'll see you later.
51:57
Jamie Anzalone: That's a bad mistake.
51:59
Jamie Anzalone: Um anyway, yeah.
52:02
Jamie Anzalone: That's kind of what I'll leave you with.
52:03
Jamie Anzalone: And thank you very much for having me.
52:06
Tracy Liberatore: Thank you again, Jamie.
52:07
Tracy Liberatore: I'm sure our listeners are gonna absolutely love this conversation, and thank you for being on the show.
52:11
Jamie Anzalone: Thanks, Trade.
52:12
Tracy Liberatore: So that yeah, that brings us to the end of our episode, and we will see everyone on the next.
52:17
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52:28
Tracy Liberatore: Statutes and stethoscopes is brought to you by Med Legal Pro, where I match attorneys with rigorously vetted medical experts and turn complex records into court ready work product.
52:39
Tracy Liberatore: If you're sitting on a case where the medical evidence isn't adding up, consider submitting it for a review.
52:44
Tracy Liberatore: I'm Tracy Libertori, and I'll see you in the next episode.