Columbia Rio Grande Healthcare v HawleyCooper & Scully attorneys successfully convinced the Texas Supreme Court to hold that, in a "lost chance" medical malpractice case involving a failure to diagnose, the trial court must instruct the jury that to find proximate causation, it must find that the plaintiff had a greater than 50% chance of survival. The court also held the trial court should have submitted an instruction advising the jury that, in considering the hospital's negligence, it was not to consider the conduct of an independent contractor physician. Because of these errors in the jury charge, the court reversed and remanded for a new trial.
Opinion handed down June 5, 2009.