PI opinions.

My jaw almost hit the ground when I read what our esteemed Supreme Court (in the context of a personal injury lawsuit) quoted, approvingly, from a Third District Court of Appeal case that treating physicians acquire their expert knowledge not for the purpose of litigation, "but rather simply in the course of attempting to make [their] patient[s] well." The only explanation that I can come up with is that our justices (or at least those in the majority) haven't kept up with the changes in personal injury letter-of-protection "medicine" in the three-and-a-half decades since Frantz v. Golebiewski was decided.

In Worley v. Central Florida Young Men's Christion Ass'n, Inc., SCI5-1086, the Supreme Court was asked "whether the attorney-client privilege protects a party from being required to disclose that his or her attorney referred the party to a physician for treatment."

That seems to be a very simple question with a very simple answer, and yet the court concluded that, before answering, it had to decide whether the financial relationship between a plaintiffs law firm and the plaintiffs treating physician is discoverable. I'm still puzzling over why that leap was necessary.

Then, the majority proceeded to disagree with several well-reasoned cases that were decided over the last 20 years (principally by the Fourth District Court of Appeal) before concluding "that the relationship between a law firm and a plaintiff's treating physician is not analogous to the relationship between a party and its retained expert."

The court's rationale was that "[f]irst, and most obviously, the law firm is not a party to the litigation." This, apparently, was how the court distinguished Worley from Allstate Ins. Co. v. Boecher, 733 So. 2d 993 (Fla. 1999), because in Boecher it was held to be permissible to investigate the "financial relationship Allstate had with its hired expert."

Respectfully, to suggest that a law firm representing an allegedly injured plaintiff does not have a "financial relationship" with...