Our firm litigates personal injury cases all over Kansas. This includes medical negligence cases in small communities and rural areas. There is a longstanding belief that jurors in small communities usually protect their small community physician and/or hospital even when convincing facts show substandard care has resulted in severe injury. While it is true these anecdotal experiences occur, our firm has had continuous success in rural areas in Kansas in actions against the local physicians and hospitals in medical malpractice cases.
For example, in the past four years we have handled cases in rural areas resulting in settlements of $4.1 million, $4.7 million, $4.4 million, $4.3 million and $1.2 million. The key to this success is: work the case hard to build an arsenal of substantial and convincing evidence to confront the defendant physician(s) and hospital to unequivocally establish that the care provided was horribly substandard; find the best experts you can find who have written extensively on the medical subject in issue in peer review texts and jour- nals; find all the medical literature and texts you can to support your case; leave no stone unturned during discovery; review and consider every hospital policy, protocol or rule that has any shred of relevance; learn all you can about the background, education and training of the defendant physician – even grades from medical school and what texts were utilized in their education – as well as opposing experts; and then, work up damages with experts, peer reviewed studies and as many lay witnesses as you can find with first hand knowledge. Assume nothing and take nothing for granted. If you do it right, venue is not an issue because the case is likely to never see the courtroom. A proper work-up dispels the myth.