It’s almost lunchtime in room 801 of the Daley Center, and Les is busily flipping through six inches of court documents in the file of a medical-malpractice lawsuit. “Let’s see what happened with this guy,” he says, tearing off a mouthful of bologna on toast. “Colon cancer!” He picks at the document with a staple remover, feeds each page into a portable scanner, then recollates, restaples, and refiles the pages.
He also hopes lawyers looking for potential plaintiffs will pay to link their Web sites to his. But it’s not just the profit motive that drives him to suffer the county’s antiquated, error-riddled computer database, the indifference of patronage clock punchers who frequently fetch incomplete files, and the tedium of distilling thousands of complicated cases into a reader-friendly format. It’s the grudges he’s nursing.
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First, there was his alcoholic mother, who was prescribed barbiturates and then fell off a hospital gurney and never recovered. There was his grandmother, a nursing-home resident who was found covered with bruises and bedsores when she was admitted to the hospital following a heart attack. Les himself was once given the wrong antibiotic for an earache, and by the time another doctor got him on the right stuff he was oozing pus and blood. He also had to design and build an arch support to relieve a foot problem after it had stumped two doctors.
He never learned the patient’s fate, but the incident piqued his interest in the ways doctors and hospitals try to protect themselves from liability. At the time he was getting fed up with how stressful and thankless his job was. He believes many hospital workers feel the same way because of constant consolidation and staff cutbacks, and says, “I would never recommend anybody get a job at a hospital. Kitchen workers and janitors get worked like slaves.” When a few coworkers lost their jobs to belt tightening, he started cutting his own expenses and looking for a way out.
Well aware that he could get sued, Les stresses that he’s posting only allegations, not undisputed facts, and that they remain allegations even if the defendants settle. He’s also careful to identify by name only doctors and hospitals, not plaintiffs. He says that’s because many plaintiffs receive huge settlements: “I don’t want them to end up being targets.”
That’s a long way off. For now, he’s offering law firms a free two-year link. So far two have signed on. Bruce Pfaff says his firm typically shies away from advertising, getting most of its business from referrals. He says he didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the site and didn’t expect much from it, but he figured it was a harmless association. Stephen Lane wasn’t very familiar with the site either, but he says clients are getting used to on-line shopping and that anything that connects them with competent counsel can’t be bad. Both agree that publicizing verdicts and settlements is a good thing for consumers.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Lloyd DeGrane.
