Jill M. Steinberg
Jill M. Steinberg concentrates her practice in litigation with significant experience in medical malpractice nursing home liability, products liability, toxic tort and professional liability. In addition to managing significant litigation for health care providers, Ms. Steinberg’s experience also includes personal injury defense, premises liability, automobile liability and general business litigation. Additionally, Ms. Steinberg has experience in class actions defense, particularly involving medical and scientific issues. Ms. Steinberg has tried more than 30 jury trials and has appeared before the Tennessee Court of Appeals Tennessee Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Aubrey B. Gulledge
Aubrey B. Gulledge, associate in the Memphis office of Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz, concentrates her practice in litigation with a focus on medical malpractice defense, nursing home liability defense, and defense of personal injury claims. Prior thereto, she focused on defense of class I railroads in FELA claims, toxic tort defense, and employment defense.Â
Baker Donelson
Baker Donelson is a national law firm with more than 650 attorneys and public policy advisors representing more than 30 practice areas to serve a wide range of legal needs. Clients receive knowledgeable guidance from experienced, multi-disciplined industry and client service teams, all seamlessly connected across 22 offices in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
Life Care Planning and Litigation Strategy
The expert opinions of life care planners are pivotal in assisting attorneys to evaluate and defend high-stakes litigation matters. Although not all matters require a life care plan to evaluate damages, for the cases that require a life care plan, these opinions become important in evaluating financial risk and exposure to the defending party. Life care planners are typically needed in catastrophic cases, such as cases involving serious injury to young persons or serious injury to persons that may require years of extended support. Defense attorneys rely on life care planners to issue spot assumptions of the competing life care opinions and their projections.
It is powerful when life care planners can provide a side by side visual comparison of their financial projections vs. the plaintiff’s projections. Further, life care planners must not only ensure that they have all relevant data, but ensure that their methods employed in reaching their conclusions are reliable and meet the threshold for admissibility in the jurisdiction in which the litigation is pending. This presentation will discuss strategies defense lawyers utilize to question life care plans that exaggerate damages and give examples of pitfalls in life care plans that have been excluded by courts.