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CORTEEN V. CRYSTAL PINES LAWSUIT
Hi. This is Michael Gills from Pfaff, Gill & Ports. I wanted to update you about a new case my law firm filed on behalf of the estate of Linda Corteen. Miss Corteen was a patient at the Crystal Pines Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center and was treated by a nurse named Sarah Diamond. This was a first for my office and in my years 25 years as a lawyer. We filed a lawsuit against someone who was supposed to be providing hospice care. The treatment that Miss Corteen received at this facility is hard to believe, but among the things that happen there, nurse Sarah Diamond actually took medication that was meant to alleviate Miss Corteen’s pain and kept it for herself. The US government is investigating and inditing nurse Diamonds and her criminal case remains pending in the northern district of Illinois. I reached out to Crystal Pines almost 2 months ago and asked them if they’d like to sit down and talk with me and the family before I had to file a lawsuit and I got no response. I still haven’t heard from them. So, we filed this lawsuit, and we’ll prosecute it as best we can, but I just wanted to send out this message to anyone who has loved ones or is considering sending loved ones to Crystal Pines please, I wanted you to know this. The Corteen family doesn’t want this to happen at anybody else ever again. If you ever need anything on behalf of you or a loved one who’s been injured due to someone else’s negligence, please call my law firm (312) 828-9666. Thank you.
HOW TO CHOOSE A PI LAWYER
Hi. I’m Michael Gill from Pfaff, Gill and Ports. I’m one of the trial lawyers here. I’m often asked by people how you’re supposed to find an attorney to represent you for a car crash or medical malpractice case or a product’s liability case. In my mind, the best thing to do is to do research online first, make sure you’re contacting people who actually do the kind of cases that you need. Many of these firms that advertise don’t actually do the work. They farm it out to other people. So, you want to find out and look through the website and find out if there’s people that actually do that kind of work at those firms before you contact them. If you look on our website, you’ll see the results from verdicts and settlements in the past. We are trial lawyers first and prosecute every case as if it was going to trial so we have a better chance of resolving it before a trial if that’s possible. And secondly, there are a number of great law firms in Chicago. You’re going to be able to find a great lawyer if you look and find people who do that kind of work. The key is, because it’s such a personal relationship, I strongly encourage you to find people that you feel comfortable with before you hire them and also to find people that are comfortable with you. For example, at my law firm we take fewer cases and a lot of our competitors just because we know there’s only so many hours in a day, week, month and year and we want to be able to dedicate the amount of time we know it’s going to take to get the case done right. So that may not be the best for you. You may want to have your case on the headlines of the Tribune or the Sun Times or be on TV and, if that’s the case, this isn’t the firm for you. There’s probably a better fit. But if you want your case worked on hard and with more than one person who’s paying attention to it being diligent and trying to get the case done as quickly and as successfully as possible, then we’d be a good fit. So, I encourage you to contact us if you need a lawyer in one of those fields and we’d be happy to talk to you. Thank you.
HOW WE WORK
At Pfaff, Gill & Ports, we have over 50 years of experience in prosecuting medical malpractice, products liability and serious personal injury cases in Chicago, the surrounding areas and throughout the State of Illinois. Our practice model starts with an initial interview usually involving both lawyers who will be assigned to the case to meet with a perspective new client. We evaluate whether we think we can help the client. If we do, we accept responsibility and then commence getting all the records that we need on a case. If it’s a product’s case: to evaluate the product, obtained the product and see it and examined very carefully. I know if you’re calling my firm that something horrible’s happened to you or a loved one and our job, our goal is to help you through that horrible time as best we can. You can count on us to do that.
PRODUCT LIABILITY
Pfaff, Gill & Ports has always done a lot of product liability cases. We handle industrial products, consumer product cases and automotive products… the whole range. At Pfaff, Gill & Ports, we prosecute products liability cases against major auto manufacturers, industrial equipment makers, construction equipment manufacturers, motorcycle helmet manufacturers and many many more. For example, we’ve handled cases against Ford Motor Company involving the Explorer for unsafe seats or involving in other automobiles for seat designs. Those designs are in the millions of products and if there is an unsafe product out there that could cause millions of harms. So we understand that by successfully prosecuting a design defect case for example we can lead to a broader societal good than merely helping one client.
HOSPITAL MALPRACTICE
When someone comes to us with a potential medical malpractice case, we’ll review the records. With our wealth of experience and prosecuting these cases, often times we’ll be able to tell you whether or not we can help you right away. Our goal is to give you an answer as soon as we can. If we can’t tell and if we need an expert to review the case, that’s the next step. If an expert believes that your case has merit, we’ll file your case, we’ll prosecute it to trial if necessary and beyond until you have a full and final recovery. Our commitment to our clients is to understand what happened in the case and to make sure that we can prove their case. We love it when we can do a broader public good for the client such as removing a doctor who’s bad from the hospital staff, such as removing an unsafe product from the marketplace things such as that. That’s a side benefit of what we do that we take very seriously and our clients really appreciate it.
ILLINOIS 2012 – INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE PFAFF
We represented a young man who had an above-knee amputation and in addition to presenting a lot of photographic and video evidence in the case, his treating prosthetists was a witness at trial. We certainly didn’t want to have our client disrobe in court where to show his injuries in that way as lawyers 30 years ago may have done, but we had the prosthetist bring in an exemplar – leg which is quite heavy – which had the same type of knee and the same type of foot arrangement that our client did. It passed among the jurors so they got a sense of just how heavy that object is that our client has to lug around every day that he wears. In that case as in any other, the most information I learned about my client and what happened to him and the harm it because came from sitting in the kitchen table with his family. If I hadn’t developed that type of relationship with my clients where I was comfortable in their house and they were comfortable speaking to me, I probably wouldn’t have learned the key things that I needed to portray to the jury which in that case came from the amputant’s mother. It’s not simply a matter of preparing your case by asking your client “How does this bother you?” but rather learning and sitting and listening and being part of the client’s family for a while to appreciate that evidence. His mother’s testimony was a week ago Friday and it was exceptionally powerful to the jury. They got a full understanding of the emotional turmoil that our client had been through as a result of losing his leg and of having his trapped in large industrial machine for 60 minutes that really no one can better portrayed she did.
