The Firm
Baltimore’s Top Rated Personal Injury Lawyers
After almost 20 years of successful practice, Paul D’Amore founded D’Amore Personal Injury Law to focus on the real-life needs of people who have been catastrophically injured in medical malpractice, birth injury, and major accident cases. The firm has successfully represented injured parties against every major hospital in the Baltimore, MD, and Washington, D.C. areas, achieving successful outcomes and obtaining life-changing compensation for their clients.
“I started this firm in order to take a different approach to catastrophic injury litigation. We don’t look at cases as being ‘worth’ a certain value. We look at them as a means to provide a life for our clients. Because there is a big difference between ‘surviving’ and ‘living’.”
The Case
Death of Young Woman Recovering from Leg Fractures
The D’Amore Law firm took on the case of a family of an 18-year-old woman. The woman had suffered a cardio-respiratory arrest and death while under the care of the ICU team at the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Prince Georges Hospital Campus. The young woman was being treated for bilateral tibial fractures. After surgery to repair her broken bones, she complained of increasing shortness of breath, which was ultimately attributed to a rare condition called “fatty emboli.” The condition requires the escalation of cardio-respiratory supportive care while the body absorbs the emboli. When it came time to place the young woman on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), the medical team was too late, ill-equipped, and performed the procedure incorrectly.
The Challenge
Locate Experts With Knowledge and Experience in Rare Diseases and ECMO Intervention
ECMO is a last-line, life-salvaging intervention with a less-than-perfect track record of success. Fatty emboli causing systemic cardio-respiratory failure is a rare, unpredictable, and untreatable event. Having both in the same case required an expert in critical care and cardiothoracic surgery with the credentials to convince a jury that this young woman should have survived.
The Result
World Class Surgeon Secures Jury Verdict for Client
The D’Amore Law firm brought in Expert Institute to find the right experts for the case. Ultimately, EI connected the firm with a world-class CT surgeon who not only had the most impressive CV but also turned out to be the clinical instructor of the defendant’s expert. After only two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of $1.1 million in favor of the young woman and her family.
“I will never forget the moment in the trial, during the cross-examination of our expert, when he slammed his fist on the witness box and told defense counsel ‘Look, I don’t testify against doctors. But in this case, madam, I have very strong opinions about the lack of proper care this young woman received. She should not be dead. She should be out there living her life, and I came here to tell this jury just that.’”
“You don’t win medical malpractice cases without great experts. EI has consistently located and connected our firm with experts who would never have considered testifying for plaintiffs before. I credit our continued record of success in very difficult cases directly to our relationship with EI.
