Radiologist spared in malpractice claim, but bungling lawyer now owes client $1.2M
A patient hoping to prosecute one Colorado radiologist for overlooking her brain tumor has, instead, successfully sued her former attorney after he failed to file suit in a timely manner.
The winding court case dates all the way back to 2006, when Della Gallegos first started experiencing severe headaches. Colorado Springs radiologist Steven Hughes, MD, should have spotted a brain tumor at the time, but missed it on MRI scans. The condition worsened and clinicians didn’t finally spot the growth until three years later, when its size had increased tenfold, the Gazette reported Friday, Jan. 24.
However, Patric LeHouillier, Gallegos’ attorney at the time, failed to file the malpractice suit in a timely manner, and the three-year statute of limitations expired. The woman’s new attorneys subsequently sued LeHouillier and won the case on Jan. 21, with jurors deeming the Colorado Springs litigator negligent in bungling the original claim. Gallegos—who underwent three “risky” brain surgeries and now suffers from partial blindness and short-term memory loss—alleges her former legal team tried to blame the woman for the legal flub. He now must pay out $1.2 million, which could balloon to $3 million with compounded interest.
“They basically just didn’t calendar this thing properly and forgot about it. And then they decided, ‘Well, we’ll just rely on the fact that Della has memory problems,’” her current attorney, Chad Hemmat, told the Gazette.
Radiologist Steven Hughes was actually compelled to testify in the case to help prove that Gallegos would have won, had her attorney filed the claim within the statute of limitations. Hughes noted during deposition that he has a $1 million malpractice insurance policy, and is part of a “well-established” physician group, according to the report. Attorneys note that, if Hughes spotted the tumor in 2006, clinicians could have treated it using a low-impact procedure with a 95% success rate.
For his part, LeHouillier claimed that he had dropped Gallegos as a client before the statute of limitations expired in December 2011. The Colorado Supreme Court had overturned a verdict against 42-year legal veteran LeHouillier originally reached in 2014, requiring proof that Gallegos could have prevailed, had the claim been filed correctly. Jurors deemed that radiologist Hughes’ recent testimony was enough to satisfy that requirement, according to the report.
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Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.