Med Mal News

David S. Wolf, president of the Philadelphia Association of Defense Counsel and an attorney at Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin, said about the case: “Litigation attorneys cannot often control what an expert says on the stand. In this case, the facts giving rise to the sanction were equivocal at best.” He added, “Sanctions at the level imposed on Ms. Raynor could have detrimental ramifications. They could bankrupt individual lawyers and possibly their firms. It is gratifying to see the appellate courts acting as a check on what could have created a chilling precedent.”

Potentially Chilling PA Attorney Sanction Will Not Be Reinstated

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court has declined to hear a case after an intermediate appeals court reversed a nearly $1 million sanction order against an attorney who allegedly elicited from a witness an improper reference to an off-limits subject. The Dec. 5, 2016, decision in Sutch v. Roxborough Memorial Hospital was undoubtedly good news to Pennsylvania's lawyers, who might rightly have feared that they could be next.

The sanction was originally imposed by Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Paul P. Panepinto in November 2014 against attorney Nancy Raynor. Judge Panepinto had ordered the attorneys in the medical malpractice case before him to instruct their witnesses not to discuss the smoking history of the plaintiff's decedent. When Raynor allegedly failed to give that instruction to medical expert Dr. John J. Kelly — who then discussed the taboo subject on the stand — the court found Raynor in contempt and ordered her to pay a total of $946,197, of which $770,000 represented the plaintiff's attorney fees.

David S. Wolf, president of the Philadelphia Association of Defense Counsel and an attorney at Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin, said about the case: “Litigation attorneys cannot often control what an expert says on the stand. In this case, the facts giving rise to the sanction were equivocal at best.” He added, “Sanctions at the level imposed on Ms. Raynor could have detrimental ramifications. They could bankrupt individual lawyers and possibly their firms. It is gratifying to see the appellate courts acting as a check on what could have created a chilling precedent.”