Justia U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Plaintiff and his wife brought an action under Minnesota law against defendant claiming that he had negligently failed to inform plaintiff that a risk of permanent blindness accompanied the spine surgery procedure that left plaintiff completely blind in both eyes. At issue was whether the district court abused its discretion when it determined that plaintiff's expert was not qualified to provide expert testimony for the purpose of satisfying Min. Stat. 145.682 and, even if the district court did not err as to that issue, whether the district court erred in granting summary judgment under the statute because it did not need expert testimony to establish a prima facie case. The court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion by concluding that the expert had no basis in his own experience for offering any expert opinion concerning what defendant should have known or done and that the expert's attempted reliance on sources of information outside his own knowledge and experience failed to cure this lack of expert witness competency. The court also held that there was nothing that defendant knew or should have known about plaintiff to indicate that either a reasonable person in plaintiff's position or plaintiff himself would have a greater concern about the risk that he faced than an ordinary person would. Therefore, the court held that the district court did not err when it failed to conclude that defendant had a duty to disclose the risk of permanent blindness on that basis. Accordingly, summary judgment was affirmed.

Monarch Fire Protection District of St. Louis County (Monarch) appealed several adverse rulings in favor of Freedom Consulting & Auditing Services, Inc. (Freedom), Freedom's owner, and a Freedom employee. The International Association of Firefighters Local 2665 (Firefighters Union), representing Monarch employees, requested an independent audit of Monarch's self-funded group health plan because union representatives believed that Monarch's board of directors had illegally approved a non-covered medical procedure for a plan member. Monarch hired Freedom to conduct the audit and Monarch subsequently sued Freedom, alleging that protected health information (PHI) had been improperly disclosed to Firefighters Union attorneys in violation of the Business Associate Agreement (BIA) between Monarch and Firefighters Union. Monarch subsequently appealed the district court's dismissal of its conversion claim and underlying claim for punitive damages, the district court's decision that the BAA's indemnity clause did not entitle Monarch to attorneys' fees and costs, and that the district court's denial of its motion for sanctions. The court held that Monarch could not show that Freedom deprived it of the right to possession, which it must do to establish conversion under Missouri law. The court also held that Freedom was not contractually obligated to pay the attorneys' fees and costs that Monarch incurred in the litigation and that Monarch could not survive summary judgment on its claim that the indemnity clause entitled it to attorneys' fees. The court further held that the district court did not abuse its discretion by declining to impose a sanction on the Freedom employee when the case did not proceed to trial because nothing in the record suggested that the district court based its ruling on a legal error or a clearly erroneous assessment of the evidence. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment of the district court.

Plaintiff, the personal representative of the estate of Velda Smith, sued defendants for medical malpractice, claiming that defendants negligently failed to transfer Smith to a medical facility where she could have received tissue plasminogen activator("tPA") to treat her stroke. At issue was whether the district court properly excluded evidence of plaintiff's medical expert's testimony and granted summary judgment in favor of defendants. The court affirmed summary judgment and held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding the expert's testimony pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 702 where the testimony was predicated on a methodologically flawed and unreliable published medical study ("Zivin Paper").