Philly saw a surge in medical malpractice filings after Pa. change on court location rules

Philadelphia saw a big increase in the number of medical malpractice case filings last year, in part because of a rule change that now allows cases to be filed in the city rather than in the county where the incident occurred.

Attorneys filed 544 cases last year, a 33% increase from the average annual caseload in the three years before the pandemic, Daniel J. Anders, administrative judge in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court’s trial division, said Tuesday during a webinar on the court’s new system for managing medical malpractice cases.

“It looks like we’re settling into an number that’s around 45 filings per month, which will be the new normal for Philadelphia,” said Anders during his presentation, which was part of a Philadelphia Bar Association event. That monthly average is about 10 more than before the pandemic, when cases slowed because of restrictions on public gatherings.

The rule change took effect at the beginning of last year. It allows cases to be filed in Philadelphia as long as a defendant has any office or clinic in the city. It was expected to draw cases to Philadelphia, where juries have long been more likely to decide in favor of plaintiffs and approve bigger awards.

Court officials did not say how many of last year’s cases would have been filed in another county before the rule change.

Curt Schroder, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, a Harrisburg trade group that favored the old rule, estimated that 41% of last year’s Philadelphia cases could not have been filed in Philadelphia before the change took effect.

Cases progressing through the courts before the rule change already resulted in large verdicts last year against Temple University Health System, the University of Pennsylvania System, and a group including the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute.

A $183 million verdict against Penn was the largest ever in Pennsylvania. The case involving a child born with severe brain injuries is being appealed.

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The city’s courts yielded last year four verdicts of at least $10 million, second only to Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, according to Richard T. Henderson, a senior vice president at TransRe, a New York reinsurance firm.

The trend toward high verdicts is starting to affect Pennsylvania’s malpractice insurance market, though not to the extent seen 20 years ago when companies stopped writing insurance policies in Pennsylvania and some insurers left the industry.

“We’re not there,” Henderson said. “We’re in a hardening market or a transitional market. There are still people willing to write, but they’re only going to write it at much higher prices.”

In response to a backlog of cases from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philadelphia trial court developed a system, including more and firmer deadlines for lawyers, to move cases through the system more quickly and encourage more cases to settle long before trial.

The number of medical malpractice settlements increased to an average of 23.9 per month last year, compared to 18.8 per month from 2017 through 2019, Anders said. In the second half of last year, the average rose to 30.3, he said.

A plaintiff attorney who participated in Tuesday’s webinar praised the new system.

“Hopefully, it will become the norm, because we never want to go back to the days when 90 to 95% of our cases settled the day of jury selection or the morning of the first day of trial,” said Robert Ross, a founding partner at Ross Feller Casey LLP in Philadelphia.

“We’re resolving far more cases, we’re resolving them sooner, resolving them with less time and effort in terms of trial preparation and less expense,” he said. “In doing that, we’re freeing up juries and we’re freeing up judges. It’s good for the system.”