$6 Million Settlement in Cerebral Palsy Case

Ten days before trial was scheduled to begin, attorneys Daniel S. Weinstock and Jason A. Daria secured a settlement of $6 million on behalf of a child who suffers from severe cerebral palsy. This is believed to represent the largest recovery in a personal injury action in the small New Jersey county where the lawsuit was pending. At the insistence of the defendants, the names of the parties are being held confidential.

The medical issues in the case focused on labor and delivery in 2002. The labor and delivery were managed by a family practitioner with some training in obstetrics, rather than by an obstetrician. The plaintiffs contended that abnormalities reflected in the electronic fetal monitoring strips should have put the family practitioner on notice that the baby was not tolerating the labor, and that the family practitioner should have called in an obstetrician for assistance.

In addition, attorneys Weinstock and Daria engaged in a highly detailed and thorough analysis of the credentialing and privileging practices at the defendant hospital in order to figure out why the family practitioner was permitted to manage this high-risk pregnancy. Their zealous efforts, which included taking nearly three-dozen discovery depositions and conducting extensive investigation outside of litigation, allowed them to prove the family practitioner had mismanaged multiple pregnancies in the past, resulting in the deaths of at least two other babies. This set the ground work for a rather unique and very powerful claim against the hospital for corporate negligence.

This settlement is projected to provide for the child’s life long medical and other care needs.