Senior Trial Partner Peter T. Crean, assisted by Partner Kevin P. McManus, received a defense verdict in Supreme Court, Queens County before Justice Pam Jackman Brown. The case involved a 60-year-old married mother of five adult children. The primary allegation is a failure to diagnose lung cancer in the setting of spinal complaints which became Stage IV spinal metastasis. Plaintiff had been hospitalized for spinal complaints and left on her own without further investigation. She subsequently returned to our defendants. The focus of the case related to her reporting to our client, her primary care physician, that a mass had been found on her lung during the hospitalization which was then not adequately further investigated before metastasis. Plaintiff had a prolonged and sympathetic demise which included pancreatic cancer said to have been metastasis. At trial, we were successful in asserting a liability defense that our physician had not departed from the standard of care. We also asserted a proximate cause defense that the cancer had already spread to the spine before her complaints and that the subsequent pancreatic cancer was in fact an independent primary cancer from which she died. The jury returned a defense verdict.
