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Who We Are 
We are a medical-legal search and referral firm based in Los Angeles with experts and clients nationwide. We offer medical and biomedical experts in virtually all specialties and sub-specialties. We also can provide paramedical experts such as dentists, EMTs, podiatrists or registered nurses.

Our experts will serve as consultants and expert witnesses for nearly every legal proceeding requiring medical or similar expertise. Our clients include attorneys, both plaintiff and defense, insurance companies and HMOs, government agencies and private individuals in every state and several foreign countries.

We specialize in referrals of experts in hard to find specialties or with highly specialized clinical or research experience. We represent panel experts that are contracted with us and independents who deal directly with our clients. For fees and referral policies, please click on the memorandum for attorneys in the left sided panel.
  
    We also offer a preliminary review at a reduced price for those lawyers and individuals that are
    uncertain about the merits of their case. Medical reviewers are all board-certified and many experts do
    both expert consultation and medical review.

Contact Us
Contact us by telephone (local or toll-free), fax, e-mail or regular mail. We will respond quickly. We offer a free of charge discussion of your case and expert requirements with our executive director. He has been an expert witness for more than 25 years and is uniquely qualified to assist you in evaluating your case.

                                            MedicoLegal Consultants          Toll-Free: 1-888-661-3593
                                            11041 Santa Monica Blvd. #719          Tel: (310) 444-7960
                                            Los Angeles, CA 90025                         Fax: (310) 444-7912
                                                                     E-mail: experts@mlegal.com
            
    Medical-Legal News & Comment*

        May 
    Order in the Court
      (New Jersey Law Journal 05-08-08)
     Must the defense put on its medical expert witnesses before the plaintiff if the plaintiff's attorney
     is going on vacation? No says a New Jersey appellate court. In a trial Kim v. Gordon involving motor
     vehicle accident injuries, the judge allowed the defense to put on its experts while the plaintiff's
     attorney went on vacation. The higher court reminded the district judge that part of a defense
     expert's testimony may be a rebuttal of that of the plaintiff's witnesses...hard to do if the defense
     goes first. The proper remedy according the appellate judges would have been to declare a mistrial. The
     $55,000 verdict for the plaintiff was vacated and the case was sent back for retrial.

      Don't Let a Hospital Kill You
      (CNN.com 05-01-08)
    Some useful tips on avoiding hospital-acquired infections. Nearly 100,000 persons die annually from
     these often resistant infections. And some of the suggested items are before you even get to the 
     hospital.

   April
    Active Duty Military Unable to Sue for Medical Malpractice
    (The Los Angeles Times 04-20-08)
     Suppose you are on active duty with the U.S. Air Force and an anesthesia error results in your death.
    Can your next-of-kin sue the military for medical malpractice? The answer is no. On the other hand
    if the same thing happened to your dependant, say a wife or child, you would be allowed to bring
    legal action. This seeming oddity results from a 1950 U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case known
    as Feres. Here the court decided that the military medical establishment is immune from medical
    malpractice lawsuits brought by active duty military personnel. The reasoning behind this oddity and
    one family's attempts to circumvent it through the legislative process is the subject of a front page
    article in the Los Angeles Times.

    Pharmaceutical Companies Writing Research Reports for Doctors
     (The New York Times 04-16-08)
     A common practice for pharmaceutical companies appears to be writing reports of their own
    research on drugs and adding prestigious physician researchers names later. This has surfaced
    in discovery documents involved in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx. Merck and other drug
    manufacturers have apparently made such ghostwriting of medical articles an important method
    of advertising their products to the medical profession. In an editorial, JAMA said the analysis
    showed that Merck had apparently manipulated dozens of publications to promote Vioxx.  “It is
    clear that at least some of the authors played little direct roles in the study or review, yet still
    allowed themselves to be named as authors,” the editorial said.

     Medication Mix-Ups Harm Hospitalized Children
     (Yahoo News; AP 04-07-08)
     As many as one in 15 hospitalized children may be harmed by medication errors: by giving the
    wrong dose or the wrong medication or ignoring drug interactions and allergies. This conclusion
    It's very concerning," said Dr. Charles Homer of the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare
    Quality. His group helped develop the detection tool used in the study. Ever since actor Dennis
    Quaid's newborn twins received an excessive dose of heparin at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in
    Los Angeles, there has been a new awareness of medication errors in children. While 22 percent of
    the problems were considered preventable, most were relatively mild. None were fatal or caused
    permanent damage, but some "did have the potential to cause some significant harm," said Dr. Paul
    Sharek, who is medical director of quality at Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

    Did Makers of Vytorin Withhold Negative Results on the Drug?
     (The Boston Globe; AP 04-01-08)
     In an action strongly reminiscent of the Vioxx debacle, the makers of the cholesterol-lowering
    drug Vytorin, Merck and Co. and Schering-Plough, are accused of withholding negative data from
    clinical trials of the drug. Vytorin was the subject of a recently publicized trial called ENHANCE in
    which the drug was found to lower cholesterol but have no effect on the intimal-media size of
    carotid arteries, an indicator of atherosclerosis. Vytorin is a mixture of two drugs, a statin (Zocor)
    that inhibits cholesterol synthesis in the liver and ezetimibe (Zetia) that blocks cholesterol absorption
    from the gastro-intestinal tract. Most of the criticism has been leveled at the Zetia component. Now
    Congress has gotten into the act and millions of users of the drug are left wondering if its advertising
    blitz on TV was a little less than factual.   

   *See Medicolegal News for additional links.