> Any law that limits the cases where patients can sue, or the amount of money they can collect, is likely to lower medical use in the hospital by less than the 5 percent they measured in their study. The telling thing about laws to address malpractice liability is that they typically are focused on capping large verdicts. But such laws are illogical: generally, large verdicts will be awarded where a doctor screwed u…
As others have mentioned, John Edwards had great success as a lawyer suing over cerebral palsy, claiming that it was caused by actions during delivery. While possible, most cases are caused by other factors such as infections, IVF, or low birthweight.
At trial, you have a sympathetic plaintiff with large needs vs a "rich" doctor and hospital. They might have caused this, they have insurance. So you systematically get very large verdicts against defendants who are unlikely to have done anything wrong. Edwards was very good at theatrics and not good on science.
Trials that rely on science and math are not great to take to a jury. Even discussions here get emotional when you deal with subjects like appropriate risk analysis and tradeoffs. Saying that you have a formula to only fix defects that kill more than x people or cost less than y per life saved is a great way of losing at trial and getting destroyed in a thread. It's also how every company and government makes decisions around safety - where stop signs go, guardrails, drug approval, armor in tanks...
Getting tort law right is hard - you want true injuries to be compensated but discourage people that are looking for lottery tickets.