Gary Cohen is Fighting for Patients – and Against the Corporate System

Gary Cohen’s commitment to fighting for victims of medical malpractice is all-encompassing. For 43 years, it has been his life’s work. Today, as private corporations put pressure on medical malpractice cases in his home state of Florida, he is only fighting harder.

“I didn’t grow up on the rich side of the tracks,” says Cohen. The attorney spent his early years living in a housing project in Brooklyn; his father was a cook in a restaurant. After moving to Florida at the age of 13, Cohen worked three jobs at a time to put himself through college and law school. “I saw that people who don’t have the advantages of status or wealth have a much harder time in life,” Cohen says. He knew he wanted to help change that – either through the law or medicine. So, he combined the two, focusing almost solely on medical malpractice cases for his entire career.  

Following time working with medical malpractice lawyer and doctor Arthur Cohen and malpractice icon Shelley Schlesinger, Cohen came to renowned plaintiffs’ injury firm Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen in 1995. The firm, which started with an almost exclusively medical malpractice focus, has recently litigated recent major cases in other areas, including the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, Fla. Cohen has garnered landmark wins in his community and beyond. In one series of cases, he litigated multiple cases against former OB/GYN Berto Lopez, under whose care Cohen’s client and five other women died. As a result of the cases, Lopez’s license was permanently revoked.

Recently, Cohen favorably settled multiple matters concerning defective spinal cord simulators. The devices, which are made to ease back pain, can cause paralysis when they move where they shouldn’t – which is what happened to Cohen’s clients. One client was paralyzed from the neck-down, with her mind intact, but unable to move except for small movements to a single finger. Cohen, passionate about financing adequate care for his clients – including proper equipment and round-the-clock nursing – settled both recent cases for an impressive eight figures each. Vitally, in both cases, the clients’ doctors chose to stop using spinal cord simulators on all future patients.

Cohen’s advocacy is wholistic, extending past the important work of taking on individual doctors and medical devices. Cohen is increasingly concerned about private hospital ownership impacting both care and legislation surrounding medical malpractice cases in Florida. “Insurance companies and corporations like HCA, Tenet and others pour God knows how many millions of dollars every year into each state to buy these legislators to put more and more restrictions on injured patients while they get more and more profit,” he says.

Cohen has his work cut out for him.

That’s good. He thrives on it.

Lawdragon: Tell me about meeting your first boss as a lawyer, Arthur Cohen, and finding medical malpractice as a field.

Gary Cohen: One of my jobs was as a stock boy at Burdines – which is now Macy's – in North Miami Beach. I did that for eight years, starting at 17. My mother got a job there, as well. When I was in law school, my mother’s manager’s son was a lawyer and he got me an interview at his firm as a law clerk. While I was there, Arthur Cohen, who was a very good friend of this other lawyer I worked for, asked to borrow me for a medical malpractice case. I absolutely fell in love with medical malpractice immediately. He offered me a job, and I grabbed it.

LD: What did you love about it?

GC: First of all, trying to help a family with a brain-injured baby, which was that first case. It was so difficult for them and being able to help that family really grabbed me. And I was very attracted to learning medicine at the same time. I never looked back at any other area of law. There's nothing I'd rather do.

LD: Did you have any other mentors?

GC: Yes. I had four mentors, the first one being Arthur Cohen. Then, Sheldon Schlesinger, a world-famous malpractice lawyer in Fort Lauderdale. He hired me as the head of his malpractice division in 1985, and I was there for 10 years. It was not an easy 10 years, but I learned every type of medicine that you can possibly think of. My library is filled with medical books, not legal books. So, that’s when I became a true medical malpractice lawyer. And, most importantly, I became a trial lawyer.

LD: What do you enjoy about trial work?

GC: It's the funniest thing. I grew up a very skinny, shy kid all the way into my 30s. I was 128 pounds and I'm six feet tall. But I learned that I could talk in a courtroom and really connect with juries. In other words, connect with people. The first time I ever stood up in a courtroom, all of that other stuff went away. I was now a lawyer. I wasn't scared or anxious. It was natural to me.

LD: You mentioned four mentors. Who are the last two?

GC: Well, Stuart [Grossman] and Neal [Roth].

LD: Of course.

GC: I learned from them to understand that most of the defense bar is just doing their job. They have families. They're humans. Shelly's attitude was, "They're the enemy. Don't ever talk to them. Don't ever give them an inch.” I learned quickly from the professionalism of Stuart and Neal to wipe that out of my system.

The first time I ever stood up in a courtroom, all of that other stuff went away. I was now a lawyer.

LD: What cases from these early years stand out in your memory?

GC: One is the very first case I tried as lead counsel in January, 1986. It was about a year after I joined his firm. It was a complex case where a young man on a motorcycle ran into another car. We contended that the hospital did not consider a neck, back or head injury. They sort of strapped him up and put him in a corner for three hours. At this point, he's shaking and moving, and it turned out he had a broken neck. When you move like that and you’re not stabilized, you paralyze yourself. And that’s what happened.

There was no offer made on the case. It had laid in the office for five years before I even got there. Shelley’s son was a new lawyer, and Shelley said to take him into court. “Get some trial experience. You're not going to win this, but just do the best you can,” he said.

Well, Scott and I decided to do things a little differently. The hospital’s defense was that he was permanently paralyzed from the moment he hit that car. So, we went investigating on our own. We know that they claimed they worked on him immediately when he got to the hospital, which was at about noon, and realized that he was paralyzed. We went to the hospital and got the original X-rays, and we looked up in the corner of the X-ray, where the timestamp showed they were done between 3:10 and 3:20. The defense didn't know about that. So, I waited the entire trial and I put the other witnesses on, including the doctor, who, by the way, had crashed his private ambulance plane and was found to have a couple of thousand pounds of marijuana in it and a cache of guns. So, he was convicted of three felonies and had his license stripped.

LD: Wow.

GC: Then, we did closing statements. The defense lawyer repeatedly said, "Does it make any sense to you that we would wait this long? Does it make any sense to you that we wouldn't do X-rays immediately?” He was making fun of me, basically. So, I got up quietly, and I walked up to the jury and showed them the clock on the X-rays. Then I said, “He asked, ‘Does it make any sense to you?’ Well, does this not prove it to you?" The first thing the jury did when they went to deliberate was to ask for a device that would allow them to look at the X-rays.

LD: Wow, what a case. Then, looking at more recent matters, you’re passionate about fighting against private hospital ownership. Tell me about that.

GC: I'm currently suing a hospital owned by a multibillion-dollar corporation.

In my extensive experience with hospitals owned by this corporation, the first thing they do when they come in is fire a bunch of people. The second thing they do is see where else they can cut the budget – machinery, operating rooms, MRIs. Whatever they can cut, they cut. That's because it's a corporation, not a healthcare provider. They couldn't care less about what happens to the patient.

In this case, there was a lovely couple in their thirties down here on vacation from Arkansas. They had been married for a few years, and they were now going to move to Florida and plan a family. He had a blood pressure issue, and he developed what's called a hypertensive bleed. He went to the hospital with a severe headache. A neurosurgeon saw him, and he was fully conscious, alert, oriented, the whole thing. He was fine, but he was transferred to the stroke center.

Almost immediately, his respiratory rate doubled. Now, a normal respiratory rate is somewhere around eight to 16. His went from 16 when he got there to the forties. Overnight, it got worse. It was staying in the 40 to 45 range. Nobody can sustain forty breaths per minute over a long period of time. His mentation changed dramatically. He was hyperventilating. His doctor testified, "If they told me about 40 breaths per minute, I would've been in there at bedside and evaluating.”

An MRI for him was ordered at three o'clock in the afternoon. But over the next few hours, it wasn't done. And frankly, it shouldn't have been done because he wasn't in the shape to lay flat on a bed. Now, it's a big hospital and it was designated a comprehensive stroke center, meaning you have to have everything in place for any kind of stroke and you have to be able to do it quickly. They designate them that way so that they can get all the stroke patients in and make a huge profit from their care. Turns out they had one MRI machine, which I've never heard of before. It’s an 800-bed hospital. It’s the only stroke center in that area. They're saving money. Simple. Soaking profit by cutting staff, by cutting machinery, by cutting everything they can cut.

So, finally, at nine o’clock at night, even though he was having very labored breathing, the nurse brings him to the MRI instead of calling a doctor. They try multiple times to put him in the MRI, but his breathing was so bad that he was moving too much. We know that the MRI attempt finished at 9:28. From 9:28 to 9:45, for 17 minutes, there's no record. At 9:45, 17 minutes later, there's a "Code Blue” – respiratory and cardiac arrest.

Then, it takes from 9:45 to 9:52, seven minutes, to get a respiratory therapist there. Not even a doctor, but a respiratory therapist to come in and intubate him. During that entire seven minutes, his brain is being damaged more and more and more because there's no oxygen going to his brain and other organs. At 9:52, the RT opens his mouth to check the airway before intubating and finds “evidence of aspiration.” (That means vomitus that has been inhaled.)He's not getting any oxygen, bottom line. Within a minute she has him intubated and his heart rate comes back one minute later. Gives you an idea of what you can do if you do it right.

They're saving money. Simple. Soaking profit by cutting staff, by cutting machinery, by cutting everything they can cut.

Unfortunately, he has now suffered what's called an anoxic encephalopathy, meaning he's lost complete oxygen to his brain for a period of time that causes severe brain damage. The couple lived in in Arkansas, but the wife couldn't take care of him herself. So, they had to fly him to New York where her aunt has a basement in her house where they now live. He is conscious, but he doesn't understand a lot of things. He can't do anything. And remember, he was 36 years old, and he will be like that forever. His wife is very dedicated to him. She's been his sole caretaker because the way our system works in this country. They can't have a family now. They need a house with a place for nurses and aides to live 24/7. They had plans, and they're all gone.

LD: What do you see as some of the practical, systemic solutions to reducing cases like this?

GC: Medicare isn’t dropping hospitals with low ratings. This particular hospital is rated as a one out of five for quality on the Medicare website and has been so for years. So, if you want institutional change, that’s one way: You say that through the federal government, Medicare is not funding executives, but healthcare. And if hospitals aren’t living up to the standards, they have 90 days, or they’re automatically cut off.

Obviously, getting rid of bad doctors is probably the number one thing as far as malpractice. I helped get rid of one. And that's in 40 years. They'll slap the hand of a couple others. But nobody really oversees the hospital as far as disciplinary measures. The structure isn't there for it. You want to fix something? That's the biggest thing you can fix.

LD: What other issues are you seeing in healthcare?

GC: Managed care is becoming the standard. Large profit-based companies are coming into Florida and other states and they're buying up practices. In other words, ER doctors are owned by a big nationwide ER company. Within the next 10 years, you'll see almost every hospital and medical practice forced into managed care where they get a salary, and they better meet certain guidelines for the profit or they're out. That's happening to medicine because of profit and politics. I pity young people in this country that have to grow up on their system like that.

LD: What do you find most fulfilling about your career?

GC: I've been able to help thousands of people live a better life and get a feeling of justice when there are catastrophic damages. You can’t bring the loved one back, but we've made a statement. Somebody has to acknowledge what they did. That satisfies the clients more than the money, believe it or not. It makes a difference. And if you ask me about my job, what I feel best about is I think I've made a difference.