When Should You Listen to Your Lawyer?

Lawyers offer special expertise which health care providers need in order to function in their highly regulated contexts. In addition, the special liability problems faced by those providers who do not meet the standard of care, merit careful attention to risk management. But increasingly, we see hospitals who are held captive by attorneys who needlessly scare them about compliance and liability risk. There are increasing tensions in this regard in the new world of quality transparency. We see lawyers advising physicians in so restrictive a way as to impinge on their ability to function as business entities. We see lawyers who over-estimate the nature of compliance problems and recommend potentially more risky efforts to fix them. After 35 years of working in this area, Alice can say, without limitation, that older lawyers offer more seasoned and reasoned advice than younger ones. Young lawyers get hysterical and rigid about things which do not merit such anxiety. In addition, too many lawyers of all ages over-control the situation where, mostly, the risks are purely the client’s to take.

On the other hand, it is not well understood that lawyers advising health care providers, and particularly boards of trustees, have personal liability, not only for what they do, but increasingly for what their clients do. This cannot help but influence the way they give advice. Still further, the context for the relationship between attorney and client can also color the way advice is given. What is the lawyer’s liability and how do we take that into account? Does a member of the law firm sit on the board of the hospital? How important are we as a client to the firm advising us? How does that affect what we are hearing from them? How did the in-house counsel pick the attorney she is recommending for a technical issue? What kinds of information should clients ask to assess the advice they are getting? Finally, are there certain kinds of issues on which the lawyer should be taken more seriously than others? These matters are never discussed openly – at the board, between the client and attorney, or by attorneys themselves. Alice is taking this issue on in a new webinar that addresses “When Should You Listen to Your Lawyer?” Aimed at hospital trustees, the issues she poses are relevant to all clients in the health care industry.