Back in my heyday of litigating and trying cases we usually had about 10-12 dental malpractice cases in our inventory at any one time. As is well known by litigators, dental mal cases are loaded with issues;
1.Usually plaintiffs have a long history of dental problems/issues which provides for a lot of discovery and the old" his mouth was a mess anyway defense",
2. Most dental injuries do not have "top shelf " value,[exception lingual nerve damage cases etc,]
3.It is always difficult to distinguish dental treatment pain from pain related to the alleged malpractice and
4. Lastly, these cases are expensive to prosecute and usually must be tried due to consent clauses in the policies. Not to mention , the defense attorneys are usually more experienced than their plaintiff-counterparts.
So are the carriers and dentists winning? I personally believe they are.While a few select firms handle them in volume, most practitioners do not want to be bothered on a case worth 100k or less which will cost 30k to prosecute.
Do you blame them?
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