have to spend a lot of time educating them
that I’ve seen it time and time again—you
put 12 people together and they get real
smart as a functioning group. Somebody’s
going to get it.”
“She’s not afraid to try a case,” says
partner Floyd. It’s part of why he hired her
after she and her partners at Kingman
Peabody Fitzharris & Ringer disbanded in
2007. “Some litigators talk about going to
trial, but they don’t really want to. She is
preparing the case for trial from the very
first day; she’s thinking about tactics, about
issues that might come up.” Ringer’s taken
50-plus cases to jury verdict.
Her wins last year included an esophageal-perforation case. After a procedure, the
patient’s esophagus had a stricture. “Meaning
the [esophagus] is supposed to be open
like this, and it was shrunk down,” Ringer
explains, demonstrating with her fingers.
Her doctor client tried to open the stricture
by passing a weighted tube down it—the
typical remedy. “What you’re trying to do
is almost a controlled tear. But if it tears
more, you develop a hole, [so] you’re putting
food down an open hole in the chest cavity,
which is really, really bad,” she says. That
happened; the patient sued. Ringer argued
to the jury that it was an inescapable risk of
the procedure. “Any doctor can do everything
right and still have this occur,” she told them.
“She knows her medicine better than
any other lawyer that I’ve met,” says Floyd.
“That’s extremely important if you’re going
to be doing med mal defense.”
Over the last five to 10 years, Ringer’s
focus has shifted—from mostly med
mal defense to a greater emphasis on
administrative law and licensing matters,
thanks to increased scrutiny from the state
Department of Health. “They’ve issued a
lot more letters of investigation to doctors,
nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists,”
she says. She thinks it’s because the
department received criticism for lax
oversight of a few “bad-apple doctors.”
At any given time she’s defending the
practices—“livelihoods,” she says—of more
than 15 clients before boards.
“I do appreciate that they have an
incredibly difficult task,” she says of the
department, but confirms their tepid
relationship. “Here’s a classic example,”
she says. “I walk into [a hearing] and they
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