Face it: As a doctor, you’re part of a truly healing profession. But you’re also a lawsuit magnet. As medicine gets increasingly complex and patients and other players get increasingly litigious, you need a good lawyer in your corner. Here’s how to make the relationship work.

1. Remember your specialty.
Attorneys can’t emphasize this enough: You’re a doctor, not a lawyer. “Don’t try to control the case,” advises Michael Khouri, a partner at Buckner Alani Khouri Chavos & Mirkovich in Costa Mesa. “Doctors get themselves in trouble when they don’t listen to their lawyers. You’ve got to let the lawyer make the decisions—not a colleague or your spouse—and do what you hired him or her to do.”

That may mean going to trial or pleading guilty when those tactics don’t seem right to you. But remember that you’re paying for your attorney’s understanding of the best way to reach your ultimate goal: staying out of jail and continuing to practice medicine. “The worst thing you can do is hire a lawyer who will do whatever you want,” Khouri says.

2. Play a part in your own defense.
“Don’t confuse communicating with your lawyer with relinquishing control over your case,” Khouri emphasizes. “Always ask questions. A good lawyer will be happy to explain.”
 
3. Hire a specialist.
Identify the specific problem you’re facing and get the right expert for the job. “If you’re having a malpractice problem, choose a lawyer who specializes in malpractice,” Khouri counsels. “If it’s a problem with sexual harassment, choose a criminal defense lawyer. If you want to terminate an employee, choose a labor lawyer.” That may mean you need more of a legal “team” than simply a single lawyer.

4. Be prevention-minded.
“When it doubt, call your lawyer,” says Lowell Brown, a partner at Foley & Lardner in Los Angeles. “Lawyers make more when clients call too late, but a good lawyer won’t want to clean up messes you’ve made by not calling in counsel soon enough.” Doctors who do call all the time, he adds, “are the best type of clients.”

5. Do your homework.
“You have to be knowledgeable about your problem,” says Robert Gans, MD, LLB, head of the Law Office of Robert H. Gans in Los Angeles. “If your problem involves a patient complaint, you’d better know everything there is to know about the patient’s condition and the literature on it.”

In addition, put effort into researching the lawyer you hire, Gans says. “The best thing to do is go to the Internet and look up the attorney’s Web page for a CV,” he says. “No attorney is going to tell you what his or her ‘success’ rate is because it’s such a variable thing.”

6. Trust your gut.
“You’ve got to feel comfortable with your lawyer on a personal level,” Khouri emphasizes. Gans adds: “If you have any doubts about an attorney—even one who looks perfect on paper—stay away. That goes for both sides. If you aren’t on the same page, you’re going to have all kinds of problems.”

7. Look for experience.
“The most important quality to look for in a lawyer is gray hair,” Khouri quips. “For serious problems relating to criminal investigations, I’d choose a lawyer with at least 20 years’ experience and, in any case, somebody who’s been a lawyer for at least 10 years.”

8. Watch out for new laws.
“After SB 1325, for example, there is increased potential for conflict between hospitals and medical staffs,” Brown says. The bill gave hospital medical staffs the right to hire an attorney at their own expense and clarified other staff-hospital relations issues.

9. Be prepared to pay for quality.
Medical Board cases can be especially expensive, costing $100,000 to $200,000, according to Gans. But the high cost is worth it if you’ve found the best attorney. “Some will do a case for a low fee because they need the money or they’re going to try to do as little work as possible,” he warns. And watch out for someone who charges too much or too little, Khouri adds, or someone who will take a large case for a flat fee.

10. Count on the California Medical Association.
The organization regularly files “friend of the court” briefs in cases that raise issues of importance to physicians generally and, less frequently—and only when other avenues of relief appear futile—it files lawsuits on behalf of member physicians seeking to enforce or clarify existing law.

In addition, the association has extensive legal resources on its Web site at www.cmanet.org. Included are summaries of cases in which CMA has been involved and an extensive library of documents, CMA ON-CALL, that discuss court cases, laws and regulations as they apply to the practice of medicine in California. CMA also maintains an online RICO Resource Center with details on the five major class-action lawsuit settlements thus far. Also, the CMA Organized Medical Staff Section provides education, advocacy resources and communication for medical staffs regarding threats to self-governance and the increasing regulatory burdens of EMTALA.