The Importance of The Legal Fight Against Nursing Home Abuse

One case that I’m extremely proud of, that we handled here at Lanzone Morgan, took over 10 years. The gentleman passed away during the case, unfortunately, but his daughter continued the case, and it was very important here in the state of California, because it changed the law when it comes to what we call 1430B claims, or Bill of Rights claims. For nursing home residents. What happened is we went to trial and the jury found dozens of violations of the Bill of Rights of our client.

The Bill of Rights doesn’t give big remedies to nursing home patients. It’s only up to $500 if the nursing home violates the Bill of Rights of a patient. But the jury found dozens of violations. And they awarded our client $250 per violation. Well, the nursing home took the position that you only get $250. It doesn’t matter how many times we violate your rights. The law wasn’t very clear. They took it up to the California Supreme Court, and the California Supreme Court said the law is not very clear, and the California Supreme Court found that It didn’t matter how many times the nursing home violated our client’s rights. They’re only entitled to one claim for a bill of rights violation and they only got $250 from that violation. After that, our client’s daughter testified in front of the legislature of the state of California to change the law and make it very clear that every time you violate Nursing home patients, bill of rights, it’s a new violation. So it’s a new penalty or fine. Whatever the jury decides, that’s going to be up to $500. So if they violate that right every single day for a year, you’re entitled to 365 violations of the bill of rights, not just one. So we’re very proud that we held on to that case for over 10 years and got the law in the state of California changed so that the nursing home can’t just say we can violate their rights as many times as we want, and it’s only going to cost us $500. Here at Lanzone Morgan, we’re very proud of the work we do. Not only do we take on nursing homes in individual cases, but sometimes we have to go to the court of appeals. And we have to go to the California Supreme Court and we have been instrumental in changing the elder abuse laws here in the state of California. We’re very proud of that and we’re going to continue to do that as long as we’re taking cases.