One crooked Pennsylvania lawyer disbarred and, by his own account at least, 1,000 more to go:
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ordered the disbarment of a Philadelphia attorney who served time in prison after pleading guilty to charges he defrauded a slew of insurers on behalf of personal injury plaintiffs who in reality had not needed medical attention.
During a disciplinary hearing Michael Radbill suggested that the practice of representing clients who are “not really injured” is endemic across the state, according to the report from the Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Board.
He also indicated that over the course of a 30-year career, 80 percent of his practice had been centered on the representation of uninjured personal injury clients. …
The federal investigation also produced evidence that Radbill had employed people to recruit personal injury clients, help stage slip-and-falls for his clients and oversee his clients’ treatment by medical providers willing to falsify records and insurance claims, according to the report….
According to the report, Radbill said at a disciplinary hearing that “I got into personal injury cases and … when I was a young lawyer, [people told me], ‘You’re going to get accident cases of people that aren’t really hurt, you say they’re hurt and you send them to the doctor.’
“That’s not right, OK?” Radbill continued, according to the report. “And I did it for 30 years and there’s a thousand more here in this state that do it, and I told [the investigators] that, and they said, ‘Yeah, but you got caught,’ [for] which I served my time, I didn’t make excuses, so that’s true.”
(Asher Hawkins, “Representation of Uninjured Clients Brings Disbarment for Pa. Lawyer”, The Legal Intelligencer, Jun. 23).
2 Comments
It’s absolutely true, of course. There are 45,415 lawyers here in PA, and something over 2% of us devote our practices primarily to fake injury work. We even have CLE’s on the subject. What you fail to mention, however, is that 87% of that fake injury work is done pro bono.
Wait a second. Did I just publish an utterly undocumented, wildly implausible, and plainly confabulated statistic on the internet? No matter. Thousands of people do it.
I’m sure glad this kind of thing is limited strictly to PA. *cough*
It’d be nice to see the state medical boards go after the docs that run up these fraudulent bills… But they never seem to, or if they do, they never seem to get reported.