How much can frivolous medical malpractice legal expenses actually cost? In the case of Dr. Lawrence Stewart of McComb, Missississippi, an otolaryngologist, he had to fight for a year, hire a lawyer, and pay out $6,100–since he had a $10,000 deductible.

That doesn’t seem very high as medmal expenses go. But the surprise here is that Stewart wasn’t even the right doctor. He was named by mistake. It took him a year just to get himself extricated from the case, which was probably aimed at his deceased father.

The younger Dr. Stewart said he didn’t think twice when he was first served with a lawsuit in 2002. It alleged that he prescribed the nasal spray Stadol to Sarah N. Ratliff and neglected to inform her of the drug’s addictive risks.

“I didn’t really worry about it because I had a pretty ironclad defense: I didn’t even treat this person and never prescribed this drug before,” Dr. Stewart said. “I was pretty sure I was going to win this.”

Dr. Stewart said he had been wrongfully sued before in a flurry of class-action pharmaceutical lawsuits filed just before Mississippi enacted tort reform to curb the mass litigation. In the past, it usually took no more than a phone call or written notice to resolve the mistake. But this time, “neither phone calls, nor letters, nor notarized affidavits to the court helped,” Dr. Stewart said.

Finally, Stewart got freed from the accusations and the court ordered the plaintiff’s attorney to pay his legal fees. But as the headline says, “Lawyer who sued wrong physician won’t pay up.” He is appealing, claiming the doctor should have to absorb the costs of being mistakenly name.

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