Who Am I? Long Term Care Lawyer and Evader of Sharks
As a kid, I wanted to be a rock star, and so it’s only natural that I ended up being General Counsel with a health care company that owns, operates, and provides management consulting and other services to nursing homes. As you can imagine, those two industries have much in common. As my friend David Crow — an entertainment attorney in Nashville and weekend fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry — put it, the synergistic possibilities are endless.
Am I being coy about the name of my employer? Yep. Why? Well, I’ll tell you. But first a story.
I heard this joke for the first time during one of my bar exam prep classes from Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a Instapundit, a.k.a. the blogfather, a.k.a. my torts professor at UT. It goes something like this:
Two campers were sleeping in their tent when they heard a noise outside. When they went out to investigate, they realized that a bear was coming after them. One of them started panicking and the other sat down and started lacing up his shoes. The one said to the other, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!” The other answered, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”
That principle applies not only to eluding bears and passing the bar exam, but to a variety of other situations, including risk management in the nursing home industry. Plaintiff’s lawyers make their living suing people for bad outcomes, and they often don’t care whether it’s anybody’s fault. Some law firms specialize in suing nursing homes, having made the tactically shrewd observation that there are a lot of bad outcomes in nursing homes. Residents in nursing facilities get old, they fall down, and they break bones. Some even die. So, even though it’s usually not the nursing home’s fault, the nursing home gets sued and usually has to pay out some sort of settlement because its cheaper than defending the lawsuit. There are sharks in these waters, and my employer prefers to, in addition to providing good care, stand still and quiet, and let others splash around and attract attention to themselves.
There. Screed over.
