Medical-malpractice battle gets personal

USA TODAY, June, 2004 by Laura Parker

There are 73,084 working lawyers in Texas. Selina Leewright never thought that being married to one would cost her her job.

But that's why Leewright, a nurse, was fired last summer by Good Shepherd Medical Center in the East Texas city of Longview. In dismissing her, hospital officials praised her nursing skills as "fantastic." But they told her that because her husband, Marty, worked at a law firm that does medical-malpractice litigation, the hospital could not continue to employ her. "I was dumbfounded," Leewright says. "They just assumed that my husband does medical malpractice, which he doesn't at all."

Leewright's firing was a measure of how toxic the battle over medical-malpractice lawsuits has become. Hospital administrators and doctors across the nation,...