Serving the Ever-Changing Needs of the Long-Term Care Industry
Our litigators represent long term care, assisted living, continuing care, and other related senior care facilities and their parent corporations in complex, multi-party cases. We have tried dozens of cases to verdict and regularly litigate high-exposure cases - including corporate claims - and matters related to arbitration agreements, discovery disputes and alternative dispute resolution trials.
We also engage in day-to-day representation of long-term-care facilities, advise clients on non-litigation or pre-litigation matters, and provide comprehensive counsel. This encompasses early case resolution and early identification of liability exposure, including: investigation, reporting and claim handling of professional liability, general liability, and corporate claims. With years of trial experience, our team primarily litigates long-term care cases and is uniquely suited to serve the industry's ever-changing needs. We stay on the cutting edge of the industry and regularly bring our insight to national audiences through speaking engagements at industry events.
Our experienced litigators understand trial tactics and strategy. Therefore, we are often able to achieve significant cost savings for our clients by assessing claims and determining their validity and value early in the claims process. Representative activities include:
- Catastrophic loss and professional liability investigations
- Assessing employers' liability
- Providing risk-management advice and counseling
We pride ourselves on the cost-effective outcomes we achieve for our clients. We have received defense verdicts in many civil jury trials involving multimillion-dollar exposures, particularly in the areas of health care law, medical and nursing home malpractice, insurance coverage, and professional liability. In addition, we regularly engage in alternative dispute resolution, resolving cases through direct negotiation, mediation, and arbitration.
In addition to litigation, Buchanan’s Long Term Care Industry Group provides the full complement of legal services to our clients including handling regulatory compliance, government investigations, corporate governance, mergers, acquisitions and intellectual property. We invite you to learn more about all of our services for the
long term care industry.
Just a few examples of the litigation results we’ve achieved for clients are listed below. Several more examples can be found by on the
Representative Experience page.
- Represented a health care company in the Eastern District of New York in an alleged age, disability, FMLA leave discrimination and retaliation lawsuit. After six days of trial and just an hour of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous verdict rejecting plaintiff's underlying discrimination claims and the later-brought retaliation claims, which were based on the health care company's counter-suit for breach of fiduciary duties. The jury also returned a verdict for the health care company on its counterclaim and awarded damages after finding that the plaintiff improperly maintained confidential HIPAA protected information and allowed such information to be accessible by the public through a file-sharing program.
- Obtained an Order enforcing the form, pre-dispute Voluntary Arbitration Agreement offered by our client to all new residents upon admission to any of their nursing home facilities. The Superior Court of New Jersey rejected the plaintiff's arguments that the Agreement was substantively and procedurally unconscionable, and void as a matter of public policy. In a detailed bench opinion, the court upheld our argument that the New Jersey statute voiding agreements "limiting the right to sue" entered into between licensed nursing homes or assisted living facilities and patients, was preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act. The court further observed that the Voluntary Arbitration Agreement was voluntary and not required as a condition of admission to the facilities; moreover, the Agreement itself was short, conspicuous, written in plain text and contained no overreaching or non-mutual provisions. Notably, the court specifically reviewed and upheld a provision of the Agreement limiting punitive damages to "three (3) times the amount of the prevailing party's compensatory damages," despite the enactment of another New Jersey statute generally limiting punitive damages to a multiple of five times compensatory damages.