Lawyers successfully sued by doctors for filing frivolous lawsuits

[Doctors, lawyers and pharmaceutical industry on health lawsuits in Minas Gerais, Southeastern Brazil].

OBJECTIVE To describe the relationship between the prescribing doctor, lawyer and pharmaceutical industry in lawsuits against the state. METHODS Retrospective descriptive study based on data from administrative files, relating to lawsuits involving medicine demands, in the state of Minas Gerais, Southeastern Brazil, from October 1999 to October 2009. RESULTS A total of 2,412 lawsuits were a...

How David beat Goliath: History of physicians fighting frivolous lawsuits

Legal and medical professions are intertwined in an intimate and complex relationship. Medical malpractice arguably constitutes the biggest point of contention between the two professions. While a significant proportion of medical malpractice complaints are not frivolous and are based on appropriate research and screening criteria, most of these complaints are ultimately settled or taken to tri...

The Effect of Frivolous Lawsuits on the Settlement of Litigation

It is commonly alleged that a substantial proportion of lawsuits are frivolous and are filed only for their nuisance value. This paper models settlement bargaining in the presence of frivolous suits as a game of asymmetric information, where the plaintiff knows the true merits of his claim, and the defendant does not, apart from any inferences he can draw from the fact of suit. When there is fr...

Doctors, lawyers, and patients: three's a crowd.

Shareholder initiated class action lawsuits: Shareholder wealth effects and industry spillovers

This paper documents significantly negative stock price reactions to shareholder initiated class action lawsuits. We find that shareholders partially anticipate these lawsuits based on lawsuit filings against other firms in the same industry and capitalize part of these losses prior to a lawsuit filing date. Consequently, we show that filing date effects understate the magnitude of shareholder ...