Medical Malpractice

Keith A. Hebeisen and Sarah F. King, attorneys at Clifford Law Offices, obtained a $7.4 million settlement on behalf of a young man paralyzed from the waist down following the neurosurgeon’s decision to deviate from an established spinal cyst drainage procedure without the patient’s consent. Kelvin Kakazu, 38, awoke from surgery on July 20, 2013 without feeling in his feet or legs. Video produced during...

Keith A. Hebeisen and Sarah F. King, attorneys at Clifford Law Offices, obtained an $8.5 million settlement on behalf of a mother who died after childbirth at Stroger Hospital following the medical team’s failure to recognize and treat signs and symptoms of ongoing bleeding from a placental abruption. Leticia Lara, 38, died Nov. 28, 2013, following the delivery of her child. On the day of...

A study by the Leapfrog Group – a nonprofit watchdog organization that assesses patient safety at acute care hospitals throughout the US – released their biannual report for Spring 2019. Illinois dropped to No. 14, one spot below last year’s report. Of the 42 Illinois hospitals assessed for patient safety, a few of them dropped to a B, thus pulling the ranking of the state...

USA Today reported on how "Hospitals know how to protect mothers. They just aren't doing it" in a weekend story entitled "Deadly Deliveries." In a cover story of July 27-29, 2018, reporter Alison Young and a team of contributors wrote of how they examined more than half-million pages of internal hospital quality records obtained through federally funded programs and the deliveries of 150 women at...

The birth of a child certainly is one of the most significant events for a family, but all of those hopes are ruined for hundreds of people following two fertility clinics destroying frozen embryos when the liquid nitrogen tanks thawed in March. Imagine women with uterine cancer who counted on those stored embryos to be their only hope for a family. Or those aging women...