Mickey (00:00)
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mickey. I am your host of the Beyond Page One podcast. Today’s guest is Paul McGivern. Paul has been a partner at Pacific Medical Law. He is a partner, sorry, with over 35 years of experience. He began his medical malpractice defense counsel for 17 years before transitioning exclusively to representing the plaintiff side. Paul is very well-decorated and has a ton of awards. We’ll go through all of them later. Welcome Paul, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your journey into specializing within the medical malpractice space?
Paul McGivern, KC (00:36)
All right, I hope you can hear me properly. The journey to where I am right now started when I was a kid, honestly, because my parents were both from Ireland and so they emigrated to Canada in the late 40s. And so I grew up in a typical Irish Catholic family. I’ve got six siblings, three brothers, and three sisters. And all of us grew up with an expectation that we would be professionals of one sort or another. Accountants, doctors, lawyers, whatever. And my dad is a physician or was a physician. And I was always kind of attracted to that as a possibility. And one of the reasons that I was interested in it was that my dad kept talking about his career for him, he said, you know, if you can find a career like he did that still interests you 20, 30, or 40 years in, where you’re still challenged, you’re still learning stuff, you’re still engaged in what you’re doing, then you found the right career. And I always thought that medicine could be that for me. For a variety of reasons, medicine just sort of never really worked out for me. And at the time when I was looking around for what else I could do, my older sister was in law school and she liked it and I thought, okay, I’ll give that a shot. And when I got in, I thought, man, this is I mean, I just, I, you know, sort of died and gone to heaven kind of reaction to it. It was just a really good move for me. And, so, you know, I decided to take, this is what I want to do. When I finished law school, I was kind of attracted to the possibility of, or any opportunity that I could get for doing what I call high-stakes litigation. And, for the first five years of my practice, I was doing corporate commercial litigation. That was quite frankly way over my head. I was working with a guy who was one of the leading corporate commercial barristers in the province. He was so busy that he didn’t have time to do a lot of the work that we were doing. So he would just give it to me and say, here, do this, take care of this, take care of that. And it just sort of allowed me to learn an enormous amount about litigation in general and, you know, high-stakes litigation in particular. And I was happy doing that.
The problem was that the firm that I was with, I wasn’t particularly keen about. So after five years, I decided that I needed, if I was gonna make a move, I needed to make it sooner rather than later because I was gonna price myself out of the market. And I was lucky enough to get into the firm that was doing the medical malpractice defense work at that time. And the guy who was the head of the group, he knew my dad, he liked me, and so I wanted to get into the group and he said, can’t do it, it’s a closed group, you can’t get in. But he said, just keep your mouth shut, keep your head down and I’ll feed you the work. And he just kept feeding me more and more and more. And I kept doing more and more and more high-stakes stuff. And then five years after I arrived, he was appointed to the bench and he just came into my office and said, here, now this is your practice. And just overnight, I went from being the junior to being the senior and I was doing the best files, the most complex, difficult files in the office.
Mickey (03:46)
There you go.
Paul McGivern, KC (03:55)
And things just kind of took off from there. I mean, it was just, it was, in other words, I was fortunate. I had people looking out for me. I had, you know, great opportunities just given to me and I went from there.
Mickey (04:09)
That’s fantastic. Sometimes luck has a lot to do with it.
Paul McGivern, KC (04:13)
Absolutely. I’ve been incredibly lucky just in terms of the people that I met, the people that decided that I was someone that should be given opportunities. So they gave me those opportunities. And I was incredibly lucky in terms of just being in the right place at the right time to take over the right work that allowed me to do what I’m reasonably good at and if I had landed somewhere else and been doing other kinds of work, I doubt very much that I would have had the success that I had had. So yeah, good luck. Good luck and surround myself with people who have helped me out, and given me opportunities. Those are the two critical things in my career. Absolutely.
Mickey (05:00)
That’s fantastic. You made a significant transition from defense counsel to representing the plaintiff side, right? What was the catalyst for that change in your career path?
Paul McGivern, KC (05:10)
The primary catalyst was that I’d been doing the defense work for about 17 years and quite frankly, I was getting bored. Your task when you’re a defense counsel is you gotta shoot holes in the case that has been presented by the plaintiff’s counsel. And I was pretty good at that. However, I found myself increasingly becoming distant from the people that I was acting for. And the cases all just became, this is a strip case, or this is a hematoma case, or this is whatever kind of medical problem case it was. And I just decided I needed to do something different. I need a new challenge. I need a new focus on what I’m doing. So I just decided I’m going to make that switch. And it was a tough decision to make because there’s a lot of financial risk associated with going from the defense to the plaintiff’s side. You have to go from an established practice to starting over and building a practice. And at the time I had three young daughters at home and I just decided, you know, I need to do it. So I did it, but it wasn’t an easy decision to make, I just thought I needed to do this if I was gonna survive. So I did.
Mickey (06:28)
Good for you. Throughout your career, I’m sure that you have seen some very challenging cases and encountered them. How did you navigate these challenging cases?
Paul McGivern, KC (06:39)
well, there are several ways that I adapted to the new challenges. One is, that I did what I had done when I was defense counsel, which is to surround myself with really, really good, really bright, really incredible lawyers who worked with me through, the cases as I was doing them. And I really, I worked with a group of people that had the same philosophy as me, which is we need to, rather than doing these things as individuals and just, you know, I have my files and my partner, for example, Suzanne Rab, she has her files and my other partner, Lindsay McGivern, has her files. We all work on all of our files together. So it became a collaborative effort and we’re very different from a lot of law firms. We don’t have billing targets. We don’t have billable hour targets.
We don’t do anything on a billable-hour basis, we do everything on a contingency basis. So we had to work together to make sure that what we were doing was in furtherance of making the firm as a whole successful. And so we adopted what I refer to as the board mind, you know, everything is a hive mind, we all, every issue that comes up, every case that we do, we talk about it, we break it down, we analyze it, we reconstruct it as a team so that we can put forward the best kind of case that we can put forward on behalf of our clients. And that’s the critical part for me is making sure that we are acting together, working together, working in unison, and moving together, and that we’re not competing with each other for billable hours or being the best biller in the firm or any kind of that garbage. We’re just interested in doing everything as a team.
Mickey (08:32)
That’s a fantastic way to look at it. I love that. Can you share with our listeners and with me some cases that have stood out to you or have always played a major role in what you do? Anything significant? I’m sure there are hundreds, but.
Paul McGivern, KC (08:51)
Well, yeah, sure. Let me answer that in two parts. The first part is what I call the systemic problem of doing these kinds of cases part. In Canada, which is where I practice, all physicians, for example, 97%, 98 % of the physicians in the country belong to the same defense group. They don’t have separate insurance. They all belong to this organization called the Canadian Medical Protective Association or the CNPA. They all throw money into that pot and they all work together to defend claims that are being brought against one of their members. So when you’re acting for an individual plaintiff, more often than not we’re acting for just regular, in fact, always we’re acting for what I call regular people who are or who find themselves in really difficult circumstances, they don’t have the financial resources because they are up against, you know, defense firms that have or defense organizations that have billions of dollars, literally billions of dollars to defend these cases. And we need to be able to put the claims together so that we can overcome those. And so, our philosophy is the same philosophy that I had when I was defense counsel, which is you have to ignore, the cost of putting the claims together, which is not an insignificant task because in the cases that we do, for example, typically there’s somewhere between 10 and 20 expert reports that we have to send to the other side to prove our case. All of those reports cost us somewhere on average between 10- $20,000.
To get to the point where we’re going to trial like we’re just outside the courtroom door, it’s gonna cost us somewhere between 150,000 and $250,000 just in terms of upfront money to put the case together. And then if we go through a trial, it’s gonna cost us another hundred anyway to put the case together. Now all of that’s money that we are putting up because our clients universally don’t have the funds to do that themselves. We lose the case.
All of that money is lost because our clients have virtually no prospect of repaying us and we don’t even try. So that’s, if you’re looking for reasons to lay awake at night and wonder about whether we’ve made the right decision in doing this job, that’s one of the fundamental things that should prey on us all the time. So it’s a systemic problem in other words. It’s not individual to the case. It’s a systemic thing that all plaintiff’s counsel has to deal with. And the lawyers that we’re up against are extremely good. They’re good people and they’re good lawyers. They’re, they’re, they do these kinds of cases all the time and they are, you know, they’re, they’re marching orders are defend the case with whatever it takes. So that’s what they do. So that’s another part of the systemic problem. So all of those things go together to make, this practice difficult, which makes it challenging. For us to survive financially in this environment, we have restricted our practice because we’re a small firm, there are only five lawyers in the firm. We’ve restricted our practice to doing just catastrophic injury cases. And so, you know, we’re always dealing with people who find themselves in very, very, very difficult circumstances.
And when you listen to the stories of what they’ve gone through, it’s heartrending. I mean, it’s really difficult. And at the end of the day, there’s no happy ending. I mean, our clients are still going to be catastrophically injured. All we can do is provide them with the funds so that they can get their lives back together. I mean, you know, we do a lot of what I call birth injury cases. And typically when they come to us, the parents, one of the parents has had to quit their job to stay home with the child. Marriages are often under stress because of all the stress associated with taking care of the child. And our task is to provide the family with the funds so that they can go and hire caregivers so that the parents can go back to work. They can get some normal normalcy back into their lives. And that’s what we’re talking about. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. When I was talking about individual cases where, sort of make me wonder sometimes about, you know, this is just wrong. I was involved in a case once where a young woman, was in her early thirties. She had, as a result of the medical treatment that she received, she wanted to, long story short, she wound up being a paraplegic. And, you know, she had to take care of her kids as a paraplegic and blah, blah.
I was acting for the physician who treated her. She had also sued the hospital, and the nurses, for what happened. And the plaintiff’s lawyer focused entirely on my client, on the neurosurgeon. And my client, for my money, had nothing to do with the problem. The problem was the nursing staff just didn’t do their job and they didn’t notify my guy in time that there was a problem. And had they notified him on time, then the problem could have been avoided.
As we were getting close to the trial, I sent the plaintiff’s counsel my expert reports in which it was clearly outlined that my client did nothing wrong. He did everything that he was supposed to do. And the plaintiff’s counsel went, okay, and quit. Just dropped the lawsuit entirely. And to my mind, I was thinking, are you out of your mind? I mean, you have a client who’s paraplegic, she needs help. And the lawyer just didn’t realize that there was a claim there against the nursing staff that should have been pursued and had it been pursued and almost certainly would have succeeded had it been presented properly. And yet it just, they, that was the end of it. They just walked away from it. And, even though I was on the quote-unquote winning side in that case, in the sense that they dropped the case against my client, I did my job. I thought that that’s a good example of a circumstance where the plaintiff’s lawyer just didn’t do her job.
You know, she had a client who needed her help and it wasn’t there. And that bothered me. I must say, that bothered me. I mean, I thought this was a real tragedy because it shouldn’t have happened. You know?
Mickey (15:29)
That’s, yeah, that does sound like a massive tragedy. Any other cases that you want to share?
Paul McGivern, KC (15:50)
Well, I mean, all of my cases are tough cases. You know, we’re just trying now to wrap up a case, for example, where if, you know, I mean, sorry, I should preface this by saying I could go on all day talking about my cases. My wife gets annoyed with me because she tells me, you never have any happy stories. You only tell catastrophic tales. But, you know, I’ll tell you one more catastrophic tale. We had, we just, we’ve gone through half the trial essentially, we’ve managed to establish liability. But the background to this case is that our client is a young mom, first pregnancy. She goes into the hospital to deliver her baby. Normally when the baby is delivered, the baby starts to head down and moves through the birth canal and it turns as it goes through the birth canal and then it’s delivered.
And this baby, it turned slightly the wrong way. And rather than coming down the birth canal, it kind of turned sideways. And so no matter what the mum did in terms of contractions, this baby wasn’t coming out. Right. And they allowed her to continue pushing and pushing and pushing for two, or three hours. And then they decided they do a cesarean section. But by that time, the baby was so jammed into the uterus that when the surgeon went to deliver the baby, she put her hand in and pulled the baby out. In the process, the baby suffered three skull fractures with a massive brain bleed which resulted that the baby had a permanent brain injury. That’s the kind of case that we do. I mean, those are the kinds of things that, that’s why I say there’s no happy ending. These are all cases where, When we do our job, we provide the family with the resources that they can use to make their lives better, but they still have the underlying medical catastrophe that they have to live with.
Mickey (17:49)
Yeah, that does not go away. Wow. Well, thank you for sharing those. Moving on, you’ve received numerous amount of accolades for your work. Out of all those accolades, which of those holds the most significance to you and why?
Paul McGivern, KC (17:53)
There are two. I mean, I get, I get emails and phone calls all the time from this organization, that organization saying, you know, we’d like to name you the medical malpractice lawyer of the year or the month or whatever. And 99 % of the time, I ignore those because they always come with a KBI, all you have to do is pay us this amount of money and we will you know, give you the designation, which I say, no, thanks, goodbye. Because you’re not earning anything there. You’re just you’re paying for a designation, which I don’t find appropriate. But the two that I find that are meaningful to me have meant a lot to me in my career are, first of all, the designation of KC, which means King’s Council. And under the legislation in this jurisdiction, Only 6 % of the lawyers in the province can get that designation and it’s designed to or historically it has been a designation of you know, these are the preeminent lawyers in the province for a variety of different reasons and that’s largely carried through to the present day. So that means a lot to me being designated as a case. One other thing that means a lot to me and the other thing, a word that means a lot to me is the best lawyer designation. You can see the plaques on the wall behind me. The way that the best lawyers designation works is that they send surveys out to lawyers in your area of practice personal injury medical malpractice appropriate securities or whatever kind of law you do, family law. And they ask the lawyers who are the best practitioners in that area in your jurisdiction, that field of practice in your area, and people vote. And so the designation of the best lawyer I’ve been in the best lawyers book since 2006. And I’ve had five Lawyer of the Year awards. Those are the things that mean a lot to me because those are the things that mean my peers recognize me as one of the best in what I do. And for obvious reasons, I find that satisfying.
Mickey (20:31)
That’s awesome. Congratulations. I’m sure that’s a fantastic feeling. You’ve had 35 years of experience in the medical malpractice space. How have you seen the field of medical malpractice litigation evolve?
Paul McGivern, KC (20:33)
It evolved in several ways. First of all, both in terms of medicine and terms of the law. And let me talk about the medicine first. Medicine has evolved to become much more complex, much more difficult, and much more sophisticated than it used to be when I first started doing this work. And those that were that evolution has largely been driven by the profession and I’m talking now about the medical profession working hard to try and deal with people like me. Doctors don’t like being sued. It’s one of the things that drives them crazy. And so there are standards that are being published that to my mind are litigation-based. In other words, they’re designed to protect physicians from attacks from people like me just because something has gone wrong.
Also, medicine has become much more focused on developing other potential explanations for things that have gone wrong. For example, genetic testing is now becoming much more common because of some suggestions that a lot of the injuries that are seen after birth are not the result of anything that went wrong during the birth process, but rather a result of some genetic abnormality in the child. We don’t see that as being correct most of the time, but occasionally it is true. So that’s one of them or another area where medicine has become much more complicated, much more sophisticated, much more difficult to deal with. So we have to stay on top of the medicine on an ongoing basis to be able to do a job. The other thing that has made the or how law evolved, so that this job much more difficult is that, for example, when I started doing this work, as defense counsel, if we wanted to raise causation as a defense, in other words, if we wanted to say, we might’ve screwed up, but the screw-up didn’t cause your injury. Your injury was caused by something else. We had to get special permission from the CNPA before we could raise that because it was considered at that time unseemly for us to be saying, yeah, we screwed up, but it didn’t cause any injury. Now, causation is an issue in every single case we do. I mean, we cannot get away from causation as an issue. some of the causation defenses that are raised are serious. Some of them are legitimate and you know, very difficult. So we have to anticipate the causation defenses and we have to be prepared to deal with them as we go through the cases. So you know, it’s the medicine and the law is always evolving. And so we on an ongoing basis, we go to medical conferences, we go to legal conferences, we review the law on an ongoing basis so that we’re always on top of it. We have to be prepared for everything that the defense doors at us. So, you know, just continuing education is a big deal for us. Let’s put it that way.
Mickey (24:06)
Yeah, awesome. What advice would you give to young lawyers aspiring to make a mark in the medical malpractice litigation world?
Paul McGivern, KC (24:15)
Number one advice, don’t do it alone. If you have never done cases like this before, you should contact someone who has been in the field, someone who has some experience in the field to work with them so that you try to avoid some of the landmines that the defense can throw in front of you. When I was defense counsel, people who had never done cases before, not always, but more often than not, they were just fodder for us to, you know, pat our stats on. I mean, there were all sorts of things that we could do, all sorts of problems we could create for plaintiffs’ counsel if they didn’t know what we were doing, they weren’t experienced enough to know what we were doing. And so, you know, to my mind, if a young lawyer is looking to do some of this work, as I said, you know, having worked with a lot of young lawyers over the years, I think that there is a minimum 10-year learning curve to getting good at doing this just because of the amount of medicine and the amount of law that you have to assimilate so you can appreciate the nuances of it. And the other thing is that a lot of young lawyers, they’re not as well financed often as more senior people. And there is a tendency, to skimp on the expenses associated with putting the claims together. And I highlighted before how expensive these things can be. And I’ve seen lots of young lawyers who don’t want to spend more money on more experts just because of the possibility that the defense is going to throw something at them. So they don’t. And that often turns out badly because they wind up not dealing with a potential issue that they should have dealt with earlier on.
So, you know, it’s really important from my perspective for young lawyers to reach out, talk to someone, work with someone who’s got some experience in the field because otherwise you’re walking through a minefield and you may not know what you’re dealing with at all.
Mickey (26:27)
That’s really good advice. You’ve led your practice to be quite prominent. Can you share some strategies that contributed to the growth and success of your firm?
Paul McGivern, KC (26:38)
Yeah. The first thing to understand is that all the accolades that I’ve received over the years, they’re never because I didn’t get them. After all, I’m a great guy. I got them because I surrounded myself with really great people and I relied on those people to help me, to guide me, to assist me, to do the job on the highest possible levels. You know, I talked about the fact that in this firm we all work together.
And that has led to an enormous amount of success for us. The other thing is that doing this specific work, there are all sorts of services out there that we get sent our way all the time. Send us your medical records and we’ll summarize them for you and we’ll tell you what’s in them. We never use those services ever. And the reason that we don’t is that if we’re gonna succeed in these cases, we have to go through the records ourselves line by line, we have to know what’s in them. We have to know what, you know, not only because we need to know what happened on a minute-by-minute basis, but we also need to have an appreciation for what’s not in the records or what’s only hinted at in the records. And if you have another person summarizing the records for you, we’re just, you know, putting together a brief of what’s in the records, you can miss those little details that often could, if we’re doing the job properly, lead to inquiries about, well, why is this here? What does it mean? What’s it all about? And so we never use those services. It’s a bit tedious from time to time for us to do that line-by-line analysis, but that’s what we need to do and so that’s what we do it. The other thing that we do is when we retain experts to review a case and to provide us with advice on, you know, is this a case or not? We need before we talk to the experts after they’ve reviewed it, we need to review the medical literature ourselves so that we can be critical of the information that our experts are giving us. And if they say, you know, in my view, this is this and this, then even if it’s supportive for us, we will often cross-examine them on, okay, well, what about this? And what about that? And what about the other? Because, even if they’re supportive, I want to know how they’re going to stand up to what the defense is going to throw at them. And if they’re not supportive, it may be that what we need to do is we need to find out from them, well, you’ve told us that this isn’t a problem, but look at X, Y, and Z. And to my mind, those are problems. And quite frankly, more often than not, once we put their feet to the fire, a lot of our experts will say, yeah, you know what? I didn’t think about that. Let me come back here. Let me look at that more carefully. So.
The point is that we need to be critical of what our experts are telling us. We need to be fully versed in medicine so that we can do that properly. We need to analyze the cases with our experts with a full understanding of every possible parameter so that we can put the cases together. And finally, just come back to a point I’ve already made. If you’re going to succeed in this thing, you’ve got to be prepared to accept significant risk.
There’s a lot of risk associated with this practice.
Mickey (29:57)
Yeah, no kidding. It seems that you’ve grown professionally through the work that you’re doing. It’s quite challenging. Personally, can you talk about the growth that you’ve had by working through this challenging field? Because I’m sure going home every single day after hearing these stories can’t be easy.
Paul McGivern, KC (30:17)
That’s true. although I found at least for me personally, that to survive in this job, you have to detach yourself somewhat from the emotions of what’s going on. you know, my wife, every so often she’ll kind of poke at me and just say, I remember when you had feelings and you know, it’s, that’s a function of the fact that as I’ve gone through this career, you do learn to detach yourself emotionally from what’s happened. She finds that I don’t react emotionally to a lot of things, for example, that she would react to emotionally, but that’s because I’m used to not reacting. Because quite frankly, if I do react emotionally to the stories that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, I couldn’t do the job. You know, I couldn’t maintain the objectivity that I need to maintain to properly analyze what are the strengths and weaknesses of our case, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the defense case, and to come to some formula for a resolution of the case, in other words, a potential settlement that will work for our clients and will work for the defense.
Mickey (31:28)
Yeah, I find the psyche of lawyers who specialize in very difficult fields so interesting. There could be a whole movie made on it.
Paul McGivern, KC (31:38)
Well, yeah, as I said, you know, it is something you learn to do over time. And, you know, if you’re going to survive doing this job in particular, and I know a lot of lawyers who just look at me sideways and go, how could you possibly do those kinds of cases day in and day out? Only possible if you detach yourself emotionally from what’s going on. You have to be intellectually engaged fully, but emotionally detached. And that I mean, it carries over a little bit, but I try to make sure I don’t bring that detachment home, notwithstanding the way my wife bugs me about not having any feelings anymore.
Mickey (32:14)
Fair enough. You’re involved in the Cerebral Palsy Association of BC.
Paul McGivern, KC (32:19)
Somewhat, you know, we were involved before and now we’re involved with other associations since then so
Mickey (32:25)
Okay. Okay. Well, can you speak to the importance of community service in your professional life?
Paul McGivern, KC (32:31)
Yeah, I think that we have an obligation as professionals, because we have access to, you know, more funds than a lot of people have access to, we have access to people in power, in many respects, we have access to all sorts of resources that people don’t even realize are there often. And so, to the extent that we can contribute to the community. I think that we must do that. And like I said, we have moved away from the Cerebral Palsy Association just because there are other things that we wanted to do. And one of the things that my wife and I moved to and that makes a big impression on us is we think that education is a big deal in helping people help themselves, right? And several years just to give you the backstory here several years ago, I came home with a paycheck and appreciated I don’t get monthly paychecks or bi-weekly paychecks or anything like that I get paid maybe once or twice a year depending on how well things are going. So I came home with a paycheck and it was a reasonably large amount of money.
My wife and I sat down over dinner to decide what are we going to do with this. And we over over dinner, decided we had enough money for our retirement, so we didn’t need to worry about that. We have enough money to leave something to our kids, so we don’t need to worry about that. So what are we going to do with this money? And so it was an easy decision. OK, at that point, let’s talk about giving back to the community. And my wife had spent years before she retired working in the nonprofit sector. And so she has a particular affinity for ground roots organizations that will for her money give you much more bang for your buck in terms of what you can do with the money that you provide. So she started hunting around and we wound up connecting with and pairing and partnering with the Big Sisters organization of the Lower Mainland big sisters, you may or may not know, that they provide mentors to girls who are potentially at risk, etc. At the time that we came to them, they had just lost a scholarship program I think the CIBC had been providing. And the CIBC provided a $1,000 or $ 2,000-a-year scholarship to these kids. And my wife and I looked at that and I thought, you know, we can help with the loss of that, but neither one of us wanted to mirror it. In other words, we didn’t want to do the same thing because if you provide our mind, if you provide a kid who wants a university education with enough money to maybe go for one year, all you’re doing is providing them with a taste of what life could have been like then you’re taking it away when the scholarship ends. So we decided that we’d initiate this program which we will provide for the full undergrad program. So if they want to get an arts degree or a science degree or whatever kind of degree, we will pay the fees for whatever program they want to go into. And to get buy-in from the kids, they’re expected to provide their own beer and their books. And so it’s a partnership so that they have buy-in and we can help them out. And we think it’s a great program. That’s the sort of thing that’s meaningful for us and what we think can make a big difference in the community down the road. Because to our mind, education is the ticket out of some very, very, very difficult circumstances for a lot of these kids.
Mickey (36:40)
That’s a fantastic initiative that you and your wife started. Congratulations. That’s awesome. In what ways do you believe legal professionals can leverage their expertise for greater social impact?
Paul McGivern, KC (36:44)
Well, kind of what I’ve just been talking about, I mean, you know, we need to beneficiaries. I mean, the lawyers are beneficiaries of, as I said, higher incomes often than people in sort of so-called ordinary jobs. They have a higher social status. They have, they get personal accolades and because of that, they, because of their standing, they can, they have a larger voice potentially in the community
Mickey (37:08)
Yeah.
Paul McGivern, KC (37:19)
If they get involved, they can have a real effect, and engaging in that, engaging in the kind of initiatives that I’ve just been describing, I think is important. I’m not a big fan of professionals who acquire enormous wealth and then just sit on it and don’t do anything with it. I mean, I think that it’s important for us to give back to the community because ultimately it’s the community that we live in that is providing us with the support for what we do. And we are where we are, usually because of the sacrifices of a lot of other people surrounding us, starting with our parents and working through. So, you know, I’m a big believer in giving back to the community in any way we can.
Mickey (38:03)
Awesome. With your extensive experience, what are some common misconceptions about medical malpractice litigation that you’ve encountered?
Paul McGivern, KC (38:13)
Okay, there are several misconceptions. The first is from a lay perspective. The first is that well, there are several misconceptions. One is, if something goes wrong, that means the doctor screwed up and the doctor has to pay and that is wrong. The courts have made clear that just because something goes wrong does not mean the doctor did anything wrong. It does not mean that you’re entitled to any compensation.
You’re only entitled to compensation if the doctor essentially screwed up and you got Injured as a result of that so, you know We’ve had we had over the years lots and lots and lots of people come to us with a complaint that this happened to me and the doctor made this mistake and Even though and because of that mistake, you know, I suffered this horrible injury and sometimes the injuries are significant Sometimes people are paraplegic. They’re quadriplegic people die because of physician errors It doesn’t mean that there’s a right to compensation. You know, I mean, when I was defense counsel, one of the primary defenses was if I can say this shit happens, you know, bad things happen to good people. And it’s just it’s a fact of life. The only way that people are entitled to compensation is if we can prove that the doctor fell below the standard expected of a reasonably competent physician and that that fall resulted in injury to the patient. So that’s the first common misconception. The next common misconception and people in this is largely in the legal community, but it filters out into the community at large because people go to lawyers and say, this terrible thing happened to me. I want to sue. And the response they get, and we have people come to us all the time saying, I went to see a lawyer and the lawyer told me you can never sue a doctor. That’s just wrong. I mean, if that were wrong, or if that were correct, my children would have started a long time ago. I mean, there is a particular way, there are particular avenues in which compensation can be obtained, but you need to know the job. You need to know how to do it.
The other thing that I think is important for people in the public to understand is that when we are retained by an injured party, we’re not going to be pit bulls. We’re not there to prove that the doctors or the nurses or the midwives or whatever are terrible people and that they should be punished. By and large, a vast majority of physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals are good people doing really good work in often really difficult circumstances. It’s just that sometimes things go wrong. I mean, there is one of the judges of one of our of the Court of Appeal here in BC who said years ago that the simple fact is that everybody screws up. Everybody screws up. And most of the time, you know, nothing comes of it because, you know, for a variety of reasons, but occasionally when you screw up, somebody’s injured and that’s why people have insurance and then you know our task our job is to provide compensation so that’s the other thing that we need to put in the right perspective.
Okay, so the, I mean, in terms of misconceptions, that’s probably the most of them. That’s probably the bulk of it. You know, the, the biggest ones that we need to, or that always comes up is that one, the first one mentioned, which is that just because the doctor screwed up, that means people think that means the doctor has to pay and it’s just wrong. So.
Mickey (41:57)
What are some lawyers who are considering establishing a practice focused on the medical malpractice world? What are some key factors they should consider? We’ve spoken about a few, but.
Paul McGivern, KC (42:04)
Yeah, I have spoken about a few. I mean, you need to work with somebody else for some time to figure out how to do this job. But the other things are If you’re going to do it, got to make sure that you’ve got the financial resources behind you to be able to do it properly. You need to immerse yourself in the medicine. That’s a big deal. You need to understand the medicine and it’s not just picking up a medical text and reading, for example, about fetal heart strips and how to read a fetal heart strip. You need to understand all of the nuances associated with reading a fetal heart strip when initially it doesn’t look good, how can it change and then it’s okay again and then even if it’s okay, how does it get bad again and blah, blah, blah, you know, all the subtle little things and that’s a function of experience and it comes back to working with other people to make sure that you know the job, but it’s, the three big things are known the mess and know the law have the finances to be able to fund the cases. Because if you don’t, you’re going to get buried. It’s as simple as that.
Mickey (43:31)
Yeah. It sounds to me that a medical malpractice lawyer is somewhat of a doctor as well, because of how much they need to learn.
Paul McGivern, KC (43:40)
Well, I’ve had, I have had people, I constantly had people asking me medical questions and I have had people asking me whether or not I will attend the birth of their child with them and the answer is no. Very last thing that Dr. wants is their lawyers sitting in the room watching them do the job. But, you know, but.
Mickey (43:56)
Yeah, no kidding.
How do you see the intersection of law and technology evolving in the context of medical malpractice litigation?
Paul McGivern, KC (44:06)
Well, I mean if we’re talking about AI and that sort of thing, I mean, you know, it’s That can it can make some parts of the job easier it can make You know the the compilation of records easier can make The summary of what’s in the records easier can help do some of the basic medical and legal research a little bit easier But as things stand right now, first of all, it’s unreliable And so you have to be super careful that anything it tells you is correct
Paul McGivern, KC (44:36)
And the other thing is that we’re still at a stage where the analysis and in particular, the judgment of the lawyer who’s doing the work is the critical factor and AI has no concept of that. I mean, we’re a long, long, long way away from AI being able to duplicate the judgment of a lawyer who’s been doing this kind of work for some time.
Mickey (45:04)
Have you leveraged any of these systems or processes for yourself?
Paul McGivern, KC (45:08)
Some, but you know, as I said, it’s limited to what we can do, because I’m a little hesitant to rely on the summaries that they give us either of the law or the medicine. Because of that, you know, there have been horror stories where lawyers have submitted briefs that they’ve generated through AI, and they’ve just been wrong. And not only are they wrong, but the AI just made up the cases that they relied upon and the lawyers have been disciplined for trying to rely on non-existent cases, that kind of stuff. Yeah, and in terms of the medicine, there are similar problems. So we need to be very careful about that. But we certainly do use the internet we need or we use online access to medical records, medical journals, et cetera. But in terms of having AI generate a lot of stuff for us, we’re still at the stage, because it is so unreliable, we are at a stage where we still do that mostly ourselves.
Mickey (46:14)
And that makes sense. What trends do you see shaping the future of medical malpractice litigation?
Paul McGivern, KC (46:20)
Well, I see it only getting more difficult, honestly, as the medicine continues to develop. A lot of the developments in medicine, and I say this in part because I go to medical conferences all the time, and a lot of them are focused on, you know, they don’t say this explicitly, but a lot of them are focused on how do we structure things to keep our practices out of the corona? And it’s not half the time, it’s not by doing better medicine, it’s on how we structure the guidelines to make sure that we’ve got enough wiggle room so we can work our way through. But in any event, I see that it’s going to get more difficult in terms of that, in terms of the standards and the guidelines that are produced by the medical community, that’s gonna be more difficult. It’s going to be more difficult in terms of the causation issues, all the things that are gonna make it more difficult for us to prove that the injury is the result of the negligence of the doctors or the nurses or the midwives or whatever. And in terms of the development of the law, there’s always a pendulum that operates in the law. And right now we’re in pretty good shape in terms of the court seem to be listening to some of the things that we’re saying about the need for compensation for a lot of our clients. But there is an inevitable swing back from time to time, and we just have to work our way through those swings. You have to recognize them when they’re coming and do what you can to deal with them. But, you know, it’s the changes in the medicine that are going to change, they’re going to make our practice more difficult, make our practices more challenging, and quite frankly, make them more interesting. You know, it’s the fun part of the job is figuring out how can we construct bulletproof cases based on the medicine as it exists, even as it’s evolving.
Mickey (48:29)
That’s a great answer. Finally, last question. What legacy do you hope to leave behind in the medical malpractice litigation?
Paul McGivern, KC (48:37)
You know, I thought about that question and I thought, you know, that one of the things that had surprised me, I got to tell you when I started practicing was there were several lawyers that I knew that were preeminent lawyers, really considered the very top of their game. Everybody thought, man, this person is just as good as he or she gets. And as soon as they retired, they just basically disappeared. I mean, nobody talked about them anymore. There was, it was like they never existed. So, I’m not anticipating on a personal level that there’s going to be a real legacy in terms of, you know, while Paul McGivern was a great guy, but I am hopeful and I, and quite frankly, I expect that the people that I work with, my partners, Suzanne Rab and Lindsay McGivern and the other lawyers that I work with, Kate McKinnis, Jessica Kim, that as a group, they’re gonna continue to make this firm one of the foundational firms for really high-quality medical malpractice work. And that, to me more than anything else, is the legacy that I wanna see and the legacy that I expect.
Mickey (49:46)
Awesome. Well, great answer. And I look forward to seeing that, seeing that happen.
Paul McGivern, KC (49:49)
Yeah, me too.
Mickey (49:51)
Awesome. Yeah, so to our listeners, Paul’s information is going to be linked below. Feel free to check him out on LinkedIn if you have questions. If you’re a lawyer, I’m sure he’ll love to talk to you and maybe take on some mentorship himself. And Paul, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Awesome. All right. Thank you.
Paul McGivern, KC (50:06)
Thanks for the invitation. It was a lot of fun.
Okay, thank you.
