Eleventh Circuit Confirms Alabama's Strict Causation Standard And Clarifies The Elements Of Informed Consent Claims

In Looney v. Moore, 2018 WL 1547260 (11th Circuit Mar. 30, 2018), the Eleventh Circuit confirmed Alabama law's rejection of an "increased risk of harm causation standard and established that lack of informed consent plaintiffs must have a physical injury.

Looney is a clinical trial case. Parents of several infants who were born prematurely claimed that the infants suffered injuries as a result of their participation in a clinical trial aimed at analyzing the effects of differing oxygen saturation levels on premature infants. Plaintiffs made negligence, negligence per se, product liability, breach of fiduciary duty and lack of informed consent claims, and they sued the doctors involved in the study, as well as the independent review board and the company that made the medical equipment for the study. Defendants won at the summary judgment stage, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed.

The simplest issue was causation. The Eleventh Circuit applied Alabama's strict requirement that a plaintiff making a negligence claim must show that the negligence more than likely caused plaintiff's injury. An "increase risk of harm" is insufficient:

The Alabama Supreme Court has made clear that, "to present a jury question, the plaintiff in a medical-malpractice action must adduce some evidence indicating that the alleged negligence (the breach of the appropriate standard of care) probably caused the injury. A mere possibility is insufficient. . . . . An alleged "increased risk of harm" is not sufficient to survive summary judgment under Alabama law, which requires proof that the alleged negligence probably caused the injury.

Id. at *3.

Confirming this standard turned out to be the end of plaintiffs' negligence claims. That's because no expert, whether it be for plaintiffs or defendants, was willing to say that the defendants' negligence during the clinical trial probably caused any of the infants' injuries. At their depositions, defendants' experts said that the infants' premature births probably caused their injuries, not participation in the study. Id. Plaintiffs' own expert could only manage to say that the clinical trial "increased the risk of harm" to the infants, not that it more likely than not injured them. Id. This testimony gave a jury no basis to find for plaintiffs, and the Eleventh Circuit...