Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Comment on early settlement offer proposal

About two weeks ago I reported that the New Hampshire Senate has adopted an early offer approach to medical malpractice that would allow a patient to initiate the early offer process.  See here

My friend Professor Chris Robinette (Widener School of Law) has now published a short response to the most common arguments against early offer programs here.

He does a good job explaining the issues and argues that programs like this one work to offer an alternative to litigants who would prefer a faster way to resolve their disputes even though they might get a higher recovery if they choose to litigate.   As I said in my original post, I like the fact that the proposal is not mandatory - if it were I would be completely opposed to it.  However, I am not sure how effective the proposal will be because the caps it sets on damages seem (at least to me) to be too low.

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