My name is Howard. Several years ago my seventy year old mother went into a hospital with nausea and a stomach ache. A few days later, without ever leaving the hospital, she was dead. One of her own doctors told us our mother had been neglected in the hospital and that with the proper care she would be alive today. But we had trouble finding a lawyer who would take the case.
First I hired a family lawyer who sent off for my mother's hospital records. Then when the case got too complicated for him, he referred me and my sisters and brother to a law firm that supposedly specialized in medical malpractice. But the lawyer we talked to at that firm told us it wasn't a clear case against the hospital and besides my mother was so old that it wouldn't be worth his time to bring the lawsuit.
The whole family was very upset. We believed my mother had died unnecessarily. But who would take the case? Then my brother remembered the lawyers at Jacobs & Dow. We made an appointment with one of your medical malpractice lawyers, and he assured us that if his experts found negligence against the hospital the firm would take the case.
You did bring the lawsuit. Over the next three years there were depositions of doctors and nurses and you uncovered documents our earlier lawyers never had, proving the carelessness that killed my mother. The hospital lawyer took our depositions, and you spent the time to prepare us well for them. In the end, the hospital and doctors who made mistakes in the care of my mother agreed to settle for over a million dollars.
Our whole family is grateful to your firm. From the beginning, we told you the money wasn't the most important thing. My brother and sisters wanted to make sure that what happened to our mother wouldn't happen to someone else. After the case settled, you told me that the hospital has now changed its procedures from those in place when my mother died. Today, patients at that hospital have an in-hospital doctor caring for them at all times to prevent the kind of neglect that caused my mother's death.
