While I hate the idea of a lawsuit, I know that sometimes they’re very important. A few years ago my a family member of mine went in for surgery on both of their ankles. She’d had trouble walking for many, many years and when things got to be too much to handle she decided to have something done about it. The surgeon was a little full of himself and instead of paying close attention to important details, he kind of went quick with it and managed to cut a nerve or two and did nothing to repair them. A lawsuit was filed when a nurse filled in my family member about what’d happened. There was a huge uproar in the surgical room in regards to this. He, being a jerk, really didn’t care and quickly sewed the nerves back together, the problem is now they don’t function properly and are causing a lot of problems.
A lawsuit was filed against him but since he was supposedly the top surgeon in the hospital, they were the ones responsible for flipping the bill. In order to protect a reputation they continued a long drawn out process of prolonging all of the paperwork and went through numerous other legal loopholes that they jumped through. By the time anything was brought to court, the doctor had no recolection of anything happening, this was a good four years after the fact, and the judge decided that nothing could be done. Nevermind the fact that someone is now incapable of walking due to his botch-job!
She wasn’t suing for millions of dollars, she wanted the cost of rehabilitation and medical bills to be covered, and possibly some pain and suffering thrown into that. It was only a $200,000 lawsuit, considering $140,000 went to medical bills I think asking for $60,000 for pain and suffering, from a multi-million dollar hospital is fairly reasonable. She knew that if she won the case she’d have to deal with a yearly payment as opposed to the full amount so she was looking into different corporations to help her to receive a Structured Settlement.
The point of Structured Settlements is to receive a lump sum of cash for your payments towards paying off credit cards and other bills, eliminating debt and reducing your medical bills. So if she were actually lucky enough to win the case, and not be robbed of her basic freedoms – such as the ability to walk – she could have easily fixed all of her money problems.
I hate law, I really do.