Physicians and attorneys

Improving relations between attorneys and physicians.

DURING THE PAST 30 YEARS, THERE HAVE BEEN 3 SEPArate medical liability crises. In the first 2 crises, which occurred in the 1970s and the 1980s, either physicians experienced increasingly unaffordable insurance premiums or many specialists were unable to purchase insurance at any price. The current crisis has elements of both, especially for high-risk specialties. Cumulatively, the recurrent cr...

The hundred-plus-year war between physicians and attorneys: peace in our time?

Guardianship determinations by judges, attorneys, and guardians.

Guardianship is intended to protect incapacitated individuals through the appointment of a surrogate decision maker. Little is known about how judges, attorneys, and professional guardians assess the need for guardianship, to what extent they apply statutory guidelines when making these determinations, and how their decisions compare. Three groups of participants (probate judges, elder law atto...

Reflections on coaching by attorneys.

There are two potential contaminants of the psychiatric examination in a medicolegal context. One is the malingering of forensically significant mental illness; the second is attorneys’ coaching of litigants in an attempt to influence the litigants’ behavior and demeanor in the examination and thus to affect the outcome. Coaching represents both a forensic and an ethics problem, but the exact n...

Plea Decision-Making By Attorneys And Judges

Objectives Approximately 95 % of convictions in the United States are the result of guilty pleas. Surprisingly little is known about the factors which judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys consider in these decisions. To examine the legal and extralegal factors that legal actors consider in plea decision-making, we replicated and improved upon a 40-year-old study by asking legal actor part...