Word: berge
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...such legal changes might affect malpractice victims is illustrated by two cases in California. David Berg, once an enthusiastic athlete and honors student at the University of South Dakota, now lies in a vegetative state in a California hospital bed. In 1980, during minor elective surgery, he suffered severe brain damage; his lawyer blames ananesthesiologist's error. The hospital and doctors settled out of court for monthly payments that could top $14 million if Berg survives for more than 20 years. Berg's attorney, Richard Aldrich, who took the case on a contingency basis, will get $5.3 million of that...
...case came into my office today," says Aldrich, "I wouldn't touch it." Berg's was one of the last major settlements reached before the California Supreme Court upheld portions of a new law that put a cap on court awards for pain and suffering and on contingency fees. That rule applied to Insurance Salesman Harry Jordan when he sued because surgeons mistakenly removed his healthy left kidney instead of his cancerous right one. Unable to work, he requires eight hours of dialysis three times a week. A jury awarded Jordan $5.2 million, but the cap law compelled the trial...
...Berg get too much? Jordan too little? The arguments and counterarguments spin like windmills in a storm. Doctors charge that extravagantly punitive lawsuits are driving many from high-risk specialties; lawyers countercharge that patients need the right to sue because medical societies rarely drive out low-quality practitioners. If doctors cry that between 1980 and 1984 the average malpractice award jumped 63%, to $660,123, lawyers may retort that half of all awards made in that period were below an unchanging median sum of $200,000. The average annual charge for malpractice insurance coverage may have increased 79% between...
These and more than 12,000 other nuances of meaning and pronunciation have prompted Lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, co-editor of the landmark Dictionary of American Slang and editor in chief of Random House's reference- book department, to proclaim Cassidy's work one of the "major publishing events of decades...
...Government has accused various Order members of a $3.6 million armored- car robbery in Ukiah, Calif., last year; the machine-gun slaying last year of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver; and other crimes ranging from bank robberies to counterfeiting. Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Ward launched the Government's case by stating that he would prove, with testimony and documents, that Jean Craig, the only woman defendant, did reconnaissance for the Berg shooting and that Bruce Carroll Pierce acted as triggerman. Ward also asserted that Order members received tax-free "salaries" of $20,000 annually...