UCI Liver Patient Sues Her Lawyer
The UCI Medical Center liver patient whose case led to the closing of the hospital’s troubled transplant program filed a malpractice lawsuit against her former lawyer Thursday, alleging that he had bullied her to accept a $50,000 settlement before the full extent of the problems were known.
Elodie Irvine said in the suit that Lawrence Eisenberg failed to put enough effort into her case, then pressured her to accept a settlement using verbal assaults and intimidation. The complaint comes as competition is heating up among law firms to represent clients who were on the waiting list for liver transplants, or the families of those who died before receiving one, in what is shaping up as a potentially enormous legal problem for UC Irvine.
Eisenberg is one of the chief lawyers handling the suits against the medical center, but others are aggressively lining up cases.
UCI is facing 18 lawsuits involving patients or families of deceased patients, almost all of them represented by Eisenberg. An additional 10 patients or their survivors, represented by Greene Broilett & Wheeler of Santa Monica, are expected to file claims as early as today.
The transplant program had more than 100 patients when it was closed in November after a federal report concluded more than 30 patients died waiting for transplants even as UCI rejected scores of viable organs, often because it did not have surgeons to perform the operations.
When UCI faced a similar explosion of litigation over its fertility clinic 10 years ago, the settlements ultimately totaled $20 million.
Irvine, 51, complained to the federal government last year over her treatment in UCI’s liver program, which led to the investigation. U.S. officials subsequently withdrew funding for the program and decertified it, leading the Orange hospital to close it.
Irvine had polycystic kidney and liver disease, which caused her liver to swell to five times its normal size. She was on UCI’s transplant waiting list from 1998 to 2002 but left the program after doctors failed to resubmit critical information about her condition and she fell to the bottom of the priority list. She received a transplant quickly after transferring to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Through her lawsuit, Irvine later learned that UCI had turned down 38 livers offered on her behalf while she was on its waiting list. But it was only after she settled that the full extent of UCI’s problems became known.
Irvine had retained Eisenberg, an Orange County lawyer who has filed more than 60 cases against UCI, many of them alleging medical malpractice, resulting in more than $12 million in settlements.
Her suit says that Eisenberg failed to detect the full extent of the troubles at UCI, that he didn’t have enough money to bring her case to trial and that he failed to disclose pertinent information to her until after the settlement was final.
Eisenberg’s motion to set aside the settlement was denied. Irvine has appealed and has retained a new law firm. She has hired a separate lawyer to handle the malpractice case against Eisenberg.
“She didn’t have all the information she needed when she was coerced into signing the settlement,” said Frank O’Kane, her malpractice attorney. “He let her down. She trusted him. Because of his failure to do his job, she never got her day in court and never got to tell her story.”
Eisenberg said that Irvine agreed to the deal after a seven-hour settlement conference with UCI and an independent mediator who recommended she take it. He said the real problems in UCI’s liver transplant program occurred long after Irvine received a transplant elsewhere.
“This is nothing more than a transparent attempt to discredit me by an attorney who is advertising on the Internet for clients who were liver transplant patients at UCI,” he said.
Legal experts said the $50,000 settlement seemed low but that her injuries may not have been as severe as those later discovered as a result of her case.
“While she may have conferred a windfall benefit on everyone else, she may be in the position where her own damages just aren’t that great,” said Greg Keating, a professor of torts and legal ethics at USC.
