The Mississippi Supreme Court issued two unanimous opinions today in nursing home cases, both ruling for the plaintiffs. In Estate of Guillotte v. Delta Health Group the Court rejected the nursing home’s argument that summary judgment was appropriate because the plaintiff failed to identify the names of the individual care givers who breached the standard of care. The Court’s summary of the testimony against the nursing home filled sixteen pages of the slip opinion. Obviously, there was a lot of evidence of breaches in the standard of care.
The Court was particularly critical of the defense:
Moreover, it does not make sense that a plaintiff’s claim can be defeated on summary judgment just because individual names are not given when there is a significant amount of expert testimony…
The Court affirmed summary judgment on the claims of failure to adequately staff, train and supervise, because of the lack of evidence to support the claim.
The most surprising thing about this case was that the nursing home was able to get the trial court to buy into the argument. This case looks like another example of defendants pushing arguments too far based on the apparent belief that the Court is biased towards corporate interests and will seize any excuse to throw out a case. It will be interesting to see if more similarly weak defense arguments are disposed of by the Court in the coming months.
The second opinion was Byrd v. Beverly Enterprises. In this case a unanimous Court affirmed the trial court’s finding that an arbitration agreement was unenforceable where a representative of the nursing home did not sign the agreement. The Court found that this meant that there was no mutual assent and there was no agreement to arbitrate.
These decisions continue the trend of the Court taking a moderate position, as I pointed out here. It’s still too early to conclude that the Court has swung back to the middle from the far right, as examined by the Mississippi College Law Review, but the signs are encouraging that we may finally have a moderate Court.