Lawyer Malpractice

Someone mentioned lawyer malpractice coverage. This review is only for entertainment purposes.

In order to get damages from a lawyer for malpractice, one must do the following,

1)  show a duty from a client lawyer relationship existed;

2) substantive damages, quantifiable in money, happened;

3) a deviation from professional standards took place, as attested by another lawyer in the same specialty (good luck with this search);

4) the damages directly resulted from the breach of duty and from the deviation from professional standards;

5) and one element never mentioned, no unforeseen, intervening cause took place;

6) overcome trial immunity; where wrongful decisions in a trial are immunized as part of the immunity of participants in a trial , like jurors or judges, and huge mistakes in judgment may not be second guessed, nor used for liability;

7) once these elements are proven to a high standard of proof, the "trial within a trial"  breaks out. You must now retry the original trial where the lawyer client endured a wrong verdict due to the lawyer mistake. You must win this trial this second time around;

8) once you win the "trial within a trial," you must show the original defendant had assets to pay the verdict;

9) once you show the original defendant had assets to pay for damages, you must show the court in your jurisdiction could have reached them and collected them for you;

10) now you may ask the judge to award compensation from the assets of the lawyer malpractice defendants;

11) then you have to get some sheriff to enforce the judgment;

12) if you get the judgment enforced, and make a $million for damages resulting from lawyer malpractice,
you are taxed on the entire amount, since you did not suffer a physical injury. After $400,000 in expenses, and a $200,000 lawyer contingency fee, you may have to borrow, $100,000 to pay $500,000 in taxes. Hopefully, your lawyer malpractice lawyer disclosed the tax implications before setting out in this decade long odyssey to get compensation for lawyer malpractice. I, for one, believe that any lawyer not disclosing the tax implications of a legal settlement before starting a case has committed, you guessed it, lawyer malpractice. You can then sue your lawyer malpractice lawyer, by hiring another lawyer malpractice specialist.

So, Tom, you can relax.

The Opioid Overdose Crisis

Drops in crime, ahead, by the millions. Then, drops in employment in criminal justice, by the thousands.

Drops in health care costs by the $billions. Then, drops in employment in health care by the millions.

Improvements of performance everywhere. Then, a richer economy for everyone.

My Algorithm for Sentencing Algorithms

1) Algorithms should be written and owned by the legislature.

2) They should change yearly, based on continual feedback from real world experience.

3) They should be subject to continual and unlimited public comment.

4) They should carry tort liability for any deviation from professional standards of due care, although
they totally qualify for strict liability.

5) They should be farmed out to experienced data mining businesses, such as Amazon.

6) They should be validated by household surveys of crime victimization, the gold standard of crime measurement. The surveys should include other crimes than the 8 common law crimes, such as identity theft.

7) All biases, such a left wing values, should be mercilessly excluded, in compliance with Equal Protection rights. End all false mitigation factors, which are really, aggravating factors. Those advocating for groups being privileged by the Democratic Party, the party of lawyer employment, should be forced to accept released felons in the houses surrounding theirs.

8) Machines are 100 times better than living beings. Try communing to work in a car or on a horse, on a snow day. All judges and prosecutors should be replaced by robots running algorithms. Equal treatment and less extreme stupidity of decisions would be the benefits.

The Family and Patient Outcomes

 1) Conditions and drug responses run in families, so interview of the family is important. The patient may know less about relatives than his parents. We need symptoms of relatives, medication responses, good and bad, and actually specific doses being used in relatives. One may also predict the future course of the patient's condition from the past of the relatives. Families could help by looking into these questions, and coming to the intake with that information prepared;

2) in no way am I against guns. I am against guns laying around with impulsive people who have dark thoughts. The best is removal to the homes of friends, and picking them up to hunt or shoot targets. Second best are metal safes in the home. I am not even opposed to the patient's use of arms. But someone should make a judgement about the mental state before handing over a weapon for sport. One of my patients committed suicide with his own gun. I demanded an investigation as to how he was allowed to legally possess a pistol after multiple hospitalizations for suicide attempts. The Berks Coroner has not responded, but that is a system problem. The family is the last chance to stop that system problem;

3) eyesight supervision, nothing beats that to prevent physical damage. We know that over 16% of depressed and manic patients will die by suicide. What is less known is that 10% of the murders around the world are committed by paranoid schizophrenics. That is 100,000 totally unnecessary and preventable murders a year. In the greatest achievement in psychiatry of the 20th Century, not the psychiatrists, but the prison wardens of the US dropped the prison suicide rate by close to 80% with no additional cost, staff, program,  treatment. Robin Williams was rich, and got fancy treatment for depression. He hanged himself, in his bedroom. Had a non-English speaking maid who knew nothing about anything except cleaning been sitting in his bedroom, he would be alive today. She would not even need to speak English, just have eyesight. She would try to stop him, and if she could not, she would get help to stop his hanging himself;

4) the law should be changed to support the physical control and commitment of people in brain failure by families, the people who know them best and care most about them. It is quite different for an addict to go out again, to score, or for an untreated schizophrenic to defend himself against imaginary threats by a rampage killing, than for a cancer patient to decline further treatment. In the case of psychiatry, the organ making decisions, the brain, has failed. I encourage families to storm the legislatures to change commitment laws to ones based on need and on safety, rather than based of loss of legal rights only after physical injury has taken place, and requiring the hiring of three lawyers for a full trial. If you liked the Sandy Hook School massacre, thank the Supreme Court. All rampage killings are 100% the fault of the Supreme Court interfering in a technical subject, psychiatry, that they know nothing about. The mother of the attacker at Sandy Hook had tried to get involuntary treatment for her son for a year, and was stymied by the legal system;

 5) no medication or therapy will work, ever, zero chance, if the patient lives with a person with inadequately treated and ongoing  criminality, addiction, or mental symptoms, such as depression. Family members who want success in the management of a loved one must get better themselves. There are few formulas with 100% certainty in medicine. This is one of them, with the cretainty of a law of physics. The duty of the family member to get successfully treated, before the patient will improve. Multiply this effect by ten if the patient is a child under 14. The undesirable alternative is the removal of the patient from that home. 

The most crucial take away message for families, today? Eyesight supervision.

Protect, Empower, and Privilege the Homeless, Get this Result

Here.

Hep A epidemic of monumental proportions.

Cognitive Bias of Politicians as Bad as that of Individuals

Here.

Then, when presented with contradicting facts, they doubled down on their beliefs.

Can Better Access to Health Care Reduce Crime?

Yes. Here. But, less in the way, the lawyer thinks.

Health care can reduce crime. Mental illness makes people poor by disabling them. They are dependent on government insurance. This insurance is totally Draconian in denying access to care. They have a relentless campaign to make access more difficult. Paper work, second guessing and cancellation of medical orders, harassment of doctors by regulatory reviews and prosecutions, marked under-funding despite the highest returns on investment (ROI) of any human activity, including crime. The ROI on crime is typically 200%. On health care it is 10,000%, especially if the patient returns to being a tax payer.

These obstructions are subject to undue burden analysis, and should be found unconstitutional. Organized medicine, run by Ivy indoctrinated leaders, just rolls over, and is not defending clinical care. To understand better, think of the ABA. Worthless to lawyers and to clients. AMA. Worthless to doctors and to patients.

Here are the opportunities. Only a small fraction of people with these conditions are treated because getting into treatment is nearly impossible, thanks to rules written by lawyers. Raising the fraction of treated people would markedly impact crime rates.

1. ADHD. It is found in about 5% of the population, more in males. It is found in at least a third of people in prison. One feature is impulsivity. So all crimes involving impulsive acts would be decreased. Beyond impulsive crimes are all other intentional crimes, stealing, lying, batteries, rapes. A treated person with ADHD is better able to calculate the consequences of getting caught, or even the feelings of victims, and may decide to not commit these intentional crimes. Treated patients have stopped stealing and lying.

2. Around the world, 10% of murders are committed by very sick, untreated people with paranoid schizophrenia. Part of the disorder is to not believe one has something wrong, to be perplexed why anyone would propose taking medications, including the family. The family, by proximity, is at the highest risk of murder. Almost all rampage murders have been committed by high functioning, but untreated paranoid schizophrenics. The Supreme Court took over psychiatry in 1976, and ended treatment for necessity. It imposed a hearing, hiring 3 lawyers, to prosecute, to defend, and to judge. It imposed a really stupid requirement of a physically dangerous act before one could even have a hearing, then limits on the time of involuntary commitment. It gutted the threat of incarceration in mental hospitals. No real abuses had been committed by clinicians. The rare ones carried Draconian punishments for clinicians acting in bad faith. The Congress should reverse this highly lethal decision, that killed hundreds of thousands of people by suicide and by murder since 1976. We should return to involuntary treatments by medical necessity. Exclude any decision making by lawyers. They do not know anything about the subject of mental health.

3. Technology is available to reduce the sex drives of highly driven sex offenders to levels where they can exercise better judgement.

4. Most psychiatric medications are 100 times safer than all over the counter medications, today. They should all be over the counter so patients may try to start their treatments without undergoing the highly obstructed gauntlet of getting into mental health care. Imagine pulmonary care. Should you see a specialist for a cold? You would crush the system, and deprive people on respirators that need their level of skill. The common cold of psychiatry is trauma, being millions per year. Today, traumatized soldiers get anti-depressants at the battle field to prevent trauma from getting burned into the brain. You do not need a psychiatrist to address shyness, fidgeting, premature ejaculation, or excessive worrying. Just go to the pharmacy, as if you had a cough.

5. Close the FDA. Replace it with data showing effectiveness of a substance from anywhere in the world and with clinician and patient ratings of experience with the substance or device. There are non-stimulant, effective treatments for ADHD, a major force in criminality. They are totally non-addictive. Government insurance will not pay of over the counter medications, but the generics are cheap. Allow competition by foreign suppliers on the internet to keep prices low. People selling impure drugs should be prosecuted for fraud, and imprisoned. Then they should be sued for any damage, including the loss of opportunity to improve. The prisoner who took a bad drug, and committed a crime because of impulsivity should be granted standing.

6. Even more common than trauma is anger mood disorder. Anger is a huge factor in crime. There are now very good medications for anger. Make them available in small doses over the counter. They will work on the otherwise normal person. End all anger crimes.

7. Lastly, addicts commit 175 crimes a year to fund their addictions. Technologies are available to increase recovery to about 50%, up from 5%. The most important addiction is alcoholism. Half the murderers, half the murder victims, half the suicides, are legally drunk.

We need an antonym for rent seeking. This is an effect where government funding results in unbelievable ROI's. That 10,000% ROI is for the client's return to function. It does not include collateral benefits, productivity jumps, soaring of property values in high crime areas, drops in trauma care cost, a more productive, less hopeless culture and atmosphere, the end of disruption of work and education for the non-criminal.

The benefit would not be an imperceptible 5% or a $400 million return on a $70 billion investment. It would be 50%, and $trillions returned to the economy.

To My Law Professor Friends Who have Reached the Subject  of Homicide in your Criminal Law Class

You can help this nation and thousands of future murder victims, by becoming the first Criminal Law teacher to disclose the following.

1) One must read the mental state of a murderer, when the murderer had a 50% chance of being legally drunk. The murderer may have had a memory blackout of the crime. You will be reading the mind of someone who cannot report his own state of mind;

2) the state of mind is dispositive. A hunter who shoots another thinking him a deer goes home. A hunter who shoots another because the other's wife paid him $10,000 will get the death penalty. Same act, same result. Yet, the drunken, careless hunter may be far more dangerous than the contract murderer, after hitting a school bus going the wrong way on a road;

3) this intent came, word for word, from here, the Catechism,

1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent."

A mortal sin is a violation of the Ten Commandments. To the credit of the Medieval Catholic Church, it was their faith, God would judge intent after death. It never claimed, men could judge intent. Catechism and Ten Commandments doctrines are a no-no in our our secular nation's laws;

4) because death was the sole penalty, even for minor violations, a loophole was needed in 1275 AD, but not today. Intent is not longer needed as a loophole;

5) the executive branch should investigate the background of the defendant, and sort the dangerous from the careless and not dangerous. The sentencing authority should be held accountable for mistakes that cause damage to future victims of crime, in accordance with professional standards of due care. These standards do not involve predicting the future, but counting the past behaviors;

6) the solution rate of murder is inversely proportional to the rate of murder, 60% in the US, 30% in Chicago, 0% in Honduras;

7) it is inversely proportional to the ratio of lawyers to population, Japan has 20,000 lawyers for 100 million, and close to no crime;

8) those blaming lax gun regulation must account for the low rates of murder in Israel and in Switzerland;

9) the five fold rate of murder of blacks, or an excess of 5000 a year, is the same as it took the genocidal maniac Klan to lynch over 100 years. The Klan was the terror arm of the Democratic Party. The high murder rates are mostly located in jurisdictions with elected Democratic Party officials;

10) around the world, 10% of the murders are committed by paranoid schizophrenics, as are most rampage murders. All are preventable with forced treatment, including long term injected medication that cannot be refused by the patient. The Supreme Court ended the decision making of clinicians. It is totally responsible for 10% of the murders of the last 40 years. And, with that idea, we return to the tragedy of Vegas.