High court: Law firm should be disqualified in case
A four-year-old medical malpractice lawsuit against Valley Regional Medical Center hit a stumbling block Friday when the Texas Supreme Court found that one of the plaintiff’s law firms, Magallanes & Hinojosa, P.C., should be disqualified from the case.
The Supreme Court directed a state district court to grant Valley Regional Medical Center’s motion to disqualify Magallanes & Hinojosa from the lawsuit brought against the health care facility in 2006 by Yvonne T. Leal and Alberto B. Leal on behalf of their son.
Their son suffered a severe infection that resulted in the amputation of his right arm after being treated for an open fracture, court records show.
If 107th state District Judge Ben Euresti Jr. does not disqualify the law firm, the Supreme Court noted in its opinion that it would issue a writ of mandamus against the court. Although the lawsuit is pending in the 404th District Court, Euresti presided over the motion to disqualify the Magallanes & Hinojosa law firm.
Attorneys with Magallanes & Hinojosa, P.C., were not available for comment Friday.
Central to the issue was whether a legal assistant at Magallanes & Hinojosa had worked on the Leal case while employed by opposing counsel, Brin & Brin, P.C.; and whether Magallanes & Hinojosa took reasonable measures to ensure that the assistant would not work on the case.
The Supreme Court’s opinion came after Brin & Brin moved to disqualify Magallanes & Hinojosa, but both Euresti in February 2008 and the 13th Court of Appeals in November 2008 denied the motion.
Brin & Brin then appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.
Defense attorneys argued that the legal assistant had been in control of all the defendant’s privileged information, knew about defense counsel’s conversations with experts, and knew what the defense attorney related about his experts to his clients.
"The issue is whether there is a genuine threat of disclosure, not whether actual disclosure occurred," defense attorneys argued.
The court record shows that before the legal assistant left Brin & Brin, she signed a confidentiality agreement. The record also says that attorney Juan A. Magallanes admonished the legal assistant not to work on cases she worked on while at the previous firm.
However, she filed correspondence involving the malpractice case and did other work, including rescheduling a docket conference, and handling correspondence and calls concerning the case. Magallanes also asked her to make a copy of the birth certificate and Social Security records of the Leals’ son.
The Supreme Court noted that "making copies is perhaps a simple, clerical matter, yet the message sent not only to (the legal assistant) but other employees at the firm was that Magallanes & Hinojosa was not serious about guarding against conflicts of interest."
The Supreme Court found that the Magallanes & Hinojosa, P.C., did not take reasonable steps to shield the assistant from working on the Leal case and that she actually worked on the case at her employer’s directive.
"A law firm that directs a nonlawyer employee to work on a forbidden case and that reasonably should know about the conflict of interest is not strictly adhering to a screening process. When this happens, the threat that confidences will be shared becomes unduly high, and disqualification is required," the Supreme Court wrote, citing case law in its opinion.
