Friday, October 22, 2010

Judge Allows Deposition of Plaintiff Lawyer

I have advocated the legal accountability of the adversary and of the judge.The defense bar has an economic conflict of interest. It can replace the client rather easily. If the prosecution is deterred, it loses its job.

Court Allows Chevron to Depose Lead Plaintiffs Lawyer in Ecuador Case

Judge based his ruling on 'extraordinarily revealing' outtakes from the documentary 'Crude'

The American Lawyer
October 22, 2010 
A federal judge in Manhattan has taken the extraordinary step of granting Chevron's motion to depose a counsel for its adversaries in the massive toxic tort litigation over oil contamination in Lago Agrio, Ecuador.
If Southern District of New York Judge Lewis A. Kaplan's ruling Wednesday in In re Application of Chevron Corp., 10 MC 00002, stands, Chevron's counsel from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and counsel for two former Chevron lawyers facing criminal charges in Ecuador will be able to ask lead plaintiffs attorney Steven Donziger questions, under oath, about his alleged attempts to influence a supposedly neutral expert appointed by the Ecuadorean court to offer a global damages assessment. The judge also has ordered Donziger to produce documents related to his interactions with the expert.
Kaplan based his ruling on evidence Chevron produced from outtakes of the documentary "Crude," which chronicles the Lago Agrio case. He called the outtakes "extraordinarily revealing."
"The outtakes contain substantial evidence that Donziger and others were involved in ex parte contacts with the court to obtain appointment of the expert; met secretly with the supposedly neutral and impartial expert prior to his appointment and outlined a detailed work plan for the plaintiffs' own consultants; and wrote some or all of the expert's final report that was submitted to the Lago Agrio court and the Prosecutor General's Office, supposedly as the neutral and independent product of the expert," Kaplan wrote.
Moreover, the judge concluded, the outtakes contained evidence that Donziger lobbied for criminal charges against the former Chevron lawyers in order to pressure Chevron in the Lago Agrio case.
Based on that evidence, the judge found, the need to obtain evidence from Donziger outweighed the general prejudice against deposing adversary counsel in civil litigation, particularly because Donziger was not acting only as a lawyer for the Ecuadorian claimants (whom he cannot actually represent in Ecuador).
"His principal functions have included lobbying, media and press relations, and politics," Kaplan wrote. "He has acknowledged in the outtakes that the purported civil litigation in Ecuador 'is not a legal case. It's a political battle' in which 'we need to get the politics in order in a country that doesn't favor people from the rainforest.'"

Sunday, October 3, 2010

DEA to Chronic Pain Patients: Suffer.

But the paper work always comes first. I would like to see organized medicine protect clinical care from these heartless lawyers setting sick DEA managing pain and interfering with care. They should join in a massive class action lawsuit, with a Section 1983 claim against the DEA. First, the DEA should be enjoined from enforcing its arbitrary and lawyerized rules. Second, the DEA should be made to pay for the damages in pain caused by their arbitrary delay. To deter. 

A Battle Against Prescription Drugs Causes Pain

Roland Lorenz has surgical screws in his back and neck and a pin in his upper leg, and when his pain reared up one recent weekend, he knew he needed something strong. He had just been to a pain clinic, where the doctor ordered an increase in his dosage of Percocet, a narcotic.
It took two days to get the painkiller.
Mr. Lorenz, 75, lives in a nursing home in St. Louis. Until recently, the nurses would have sent an order to the pharmacy for the Percocet, based on instructions phoned in from the clinic — a longstanding practice for nursing homes, which typically do not have a full-time doctor on staff.
But now that practice has come under the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Last November, the pharmacy serving Mr. Lorenz’s nursing home announced that it would no longer dispense certain narcotics without a written or faxed prescription from a doctor.
For Mr. Lorenz, this meant a weekend of pain. The doctor at the pain clinic was not available, and the nursing home’s doctor on call would not write a prescription without examining Mr. Lorenz in person. For the next two days, Mr. Lorenz said, “I was miserable. I needed it to get straightened out. It was killing me.”
Staff members assured him that the drug was on its way at least six or seven times, said Mr. Lorenz, a former Marine and police officer.
“It’ll be there by midnight. It’ll be there by 2 a.m. The pharmacist kept saying he needed to talk to the doctor. It was real, real rough.”
Nursing homes and doctors say patients like Mr. Lorenz have become unintended casualties in the war on drugs because of a new level of enforcement intended to prevent narcotics from getting into the wrong hands. About 1.4 million Americans live in nursing homes.
The D.E.A. is investigating pharmacists in “about five states” for dispensing the drugs to nursing homes without direct written orders from a doctor, said Gary L. Boggs, an executive assistant in the agency’s Office of Diversion Control.
Earlier this year, the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging heard testimony from long-term-care professionals describing delays in delivering pain medications to patients. Two Democratic committee members, Senators Herb Kohl of Wisconsin and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, have urged Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to find a solution.
“We keep hearing the right things from the D.E.A. on this issue, but we haven’t seen any action,” Mr. Kohl said through an aide.
Mr. Boggs said the agency was just trying to protect patients. “This isn’t a matter of us being bureaucratic pencil pushers,” he said. “What we see is nurses unilaterally calling in prescriptions, or pharmacists dispensing controlled substances without a prescription, then trying to get a doctor to sign a prescription for a patient he never saw.”
In the meantime, doctors say, their patients suffer — sometimes for half an hour, sometimes for several days.
“There’s just a lot of potential for error in the process,” said Dr. Jonathan Musher, a geriatrician and past president of the American Medical Directors Association, a trade group of long-term-care doctors and administrators, which has sought a change in the requirements.
The problems are most common when patients first arrive at nursing homes from hospitals, Dr. Musher said.
For example, he recently had a patient move to a nursing home after a hip fracture. At the time, she was not on narcotic pain medication. That night the nurse called Dr. Musher to say that the woman was in pain. “I was told I had to call the pharmacist,” he said. “O.K., what’s the pharmacist’s number? The nurse has to call me back, she wasn’t sure. I get a call back with the number. I call the 800 number and leave a message. I get a call back a half hour later.
“So now there’s been a 45-minute delay. Now he tells me I have to fax in a prescription. I’m not home, so I say I will do it in 15 minutes. After I fax it, I call the nursing home, and they haven’t heard anything from the pharmacist. Finally I told them to send the patient to the hospital.”
She got her medication, “but that’s something we don’t want to do,” Dr. Musher said. “There are health issues with transfer, as well as the costs of transfer.”
Critics of the nursing home industry say the bigger problem is that facilities are not providing adequate medical care to their patients.