Lewis v. Waletzky

• Decision Date: 27 October 2011
• Docket Number: Misc. No. 3,2010.,Sept. Term
• Citation: 422 Md. 647,31 A.3d 123
• Parties: Katherine M. LEWIS v. Jeremy P. WALETZKY.
• Court: Maryland Court of Appeals

31 A.3d 123

422 Md. 647

Katherine M. LEWIS

v.Jeremy P. WALETZKY.

Misc. No. 3

Sept. Term

2010.

Court of Appeals of Maryland.

Oct. 27, 2011.

Paul McCourt Curley (Canfield, Baer LLP of Richmond, VA), on brief, for Appellant.

Erica C. Mudd (Kenneth Armstrong of Armstrong, Donohue, Ceppos, Vaughan & Rhoades, Chartered, Rockville, MD), on brief, for Appellee.

Argued before BELL, C.J., HARRELL, BATTAGLIA, GREENE,^*MURPHY, ADKINS and BARBERA, JJ.BARBERA, J.

We have before us a question of law certified by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit pursuant to the Maryland Uniform Certification of Questions of Law Act, Maryland Code (1974, 2006 Repl.Vol.), § § 12–601 to 12–613 of the Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article (“CJ”). The question arises from a medical malpractice suit that Katherine Lewis filed in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland (“District Court”) against her former psychiatrist, Dr. Jeremy P. Waletzky, for injuries she allegedly sustained as a result of medications he prescribed to her.

Medical malpractice cases in Maryland are governed by the Health Care Malpractice Claims statute (herein “the Act”), CJ §§ 3–2A–01 through 3–2A–10.¹ As will be explained in more detail infra, Lewis did not comply with various administrative filing requirements set forth in the Act before filing her complaint in the District Court. Under Maryland law, those administrative filing requirements are a condition precedent to initiating suit in Maryland state courts and federal courts located in Maryland. Carroll v. Konits, 400 Md. 167, 181, 929 A.2d 19, 28 (2007). Failure to meet these requirements, when applicable, results in dismissal of the suit without prejudice. Kearney v. Berger, 416 Md. 628, 668–69, 7 A.3d 593, 616–17 (2010).

Before the District Court, Waletzky filed a motion to dismiss the complaint, arguing that Lewis was required to have complied with the Act's filing requirements. Lewis responded that she was not subject to the Act because the injury occurred in Washington, D.C. (hereinafter “D.C.”) and therefore D.C. law governed her malpractice suit. Resolution of that matter implicates choice-of-law principles, to which the District Court, sitting in diversity jurisdiction, was required to apply Maryland's choice-of-law principles. See, e.g., Day & Zimmermann, Inc. v. Challoner, 423 U.S. 3, 4, 96 S.Ct. 167, 46 L.Ed.2d 3 (1975) (per curiam) (holding that federal courts sitting in diversity jurisdiction must apply the choice-of-law rules of the state in which the court is located).

Following argument and briefing, the District Court filed a written opinion granting Waletzky's motion to dismiss. The District Court considered the filing requirements of the Act to be substantive tort law; the court therefore focused on Maryland's application of lex loci delicti. That rule directs a court to “apply the [substantive tort] law of the place where the tort or wrong was committed.” See Lab. Corp. of Am. v. Hood, 395 Md. 608, 613, 911 A.2d 841, 844 (2006). Because the injury occurred in D.C., ² the District Court reasoned that, pursuant to lex loci delicti, D.C. law, which at that time had no specific procedural requirements for medical malpractice claims, would govern the present litigation. The District Court determined, however, that the Act's filing requirements implicated strong public policy sufficient to require Lewis's compliance with those requirements, thereby invoking the public policy exception to lex loci delicti. The District Court therefore dismissed the suit without prejudice, pursuant to Kearney. See Kearney, 416 Md. at 668–69, 7 A.3d at 616–17 (explaining that failure to comply with the requirements of the Act requires dismissal without prejudice).

On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (hereinafter “Court of Appeals”) determined that the choice-of-law issue involves a question of unresolved Maryland law and, thus, should be decided by this Court. The Court of Appeals certified the following question to this Court:

Does Maryland recognize the public policy exception, or any other exception, to lex loci delicti based on the Maryland Health Care Malpractice Claims Act ... which requires a plaintiff to comply with certain mandatory administrative filings prior to filing a medical malpractice lawsuit in a Maryland court?

I.

As we have mentioned, this litigation involves a claim of alleged medical malpractice. The Court of Appeals has provided us with the underlying facts of the federal suit:

Lewis alleges the following facts in her complaint which, for purposes of this appeal, are not disputed....

Lewis, once a resident of [Washington, D.C.] and currently a resident of Minnesota was formerly a patient of Waletzky. Waletzky, at all times relevant, was a physician licensed to practice in the State of Maryland and had his office in Chevy Chase or Bethesda, Maryland. From approximately October 2000 until January 2005, Waletzky was Lewis' psychiatrist and treated her at his Chevy Chase office. Waletzky prescribed several psychotropic medications to Lewis, including antidepressants and stimulants, and also prescribed antipsychotic and/or neuroleptic drugs. All of the prescribed medications were filled in pharmacies in [Washington, DC] and ingested by Lewis while she was in [Washington, DC].

During the treatment period, Waletzky did not diagnose Lewis with any serious mental disorder and never made any diagnosis of Lewis' psychiatric condition. After taking the prescribed antipsychotics, Lewis began experiencing adverse side effects and discontinued her use of these medications. Immediately after experiencing these adverse side effects, Lewis suffered, for the first time in her life, an anxiety attack. She contacted Waletzky who instructed her to continue taking the antipsychotic medications and wrote her additional prescriptions in order for her to “taper off” the antipsychotic medications. While she was “tapering off” the antipsychotic medications, Lewis continued to experience adverse side effects, including extreme jaw tension and clenching, anxiety, and other effects. After completely withdrawing from the antipsychotic drugs, Lewis' side effects persisted and worsened, and she was eventually diagnosed with a permanent neurological disorder known as Tardive Dyskinesia/Dystonia caused by the antipsychotics she had taken.

(internal citations omitted).

II.

Given the question before us, we need not discuss at length all the various provisions of the Act ³; instead we focus on the provisions of the Act pertinent to the question we must answer. In effect since 1976, the Act created the Health Care Alternative Dispute Resolution Office (“HCADRO”) for the purpose of establishing and administering an arbitration process for medical malpractice claims prior to court action.

The Act includes various procedural provisions that a plaintiff pursuing a medical malpractice action must satisfy before being able to prosecute his or her claim in a court of Maryland. See CJ § 3–2A–02 (“Exclusiveness of procedures”).⁴ In the years following its enactment, the Act has been modified so that today, and at the time of the present case, arbitration may be waived unilaterally by either the plaintiff or the health care provider by filing a written election with the Director of HCADRO indicating the party's desire to do so. See CJ § 3–2A–06B.⁵ Whether or not a plaintiff elects to forego the arbitration process, CJ § 3–2A–04(a)(1)(i) requires the plaintiff, as a condition precedent to proceeding, to file with the Director of the HCADRO his or her medical malpractice claim. CJ § 3–2A–04(a) ⁶; see also Kearney, 416 Md. at 656–57, 7 A.3d at 609–10. Within 90 days of filing that claim, the plaintiff must also file with the Director of HCADRO a certificate of a qualified expert. CJ § 3–2A–04(b).⁷ That certificate must contain the qualified expert's attestations to a “departure from [the] standards of care, and that the departure ... is the proximate cause of the alleged injury.” CJ § 3–2A–04(b)(1)(i)(1).

“[W]e have repeatedly held that adherence to the [Act's] procedures is necessary to maintain a claim that is subject to the [Act].” Kearney, 416 Md. at 655, 7 A.3d at 608. In that regard, we have not hesitated to dismiss a claim because the plaintiff failed to comply with the Act's administrative filing requirements. See id. at 657–58, 660–61, 7 A.3d at 610–11 (stating that “[t]he requirement that the claimant or plaintiff file a certificate of qualified expert serves an important purpose, even in cases of unilateral waiver[,]” and dismissing the claim for failure to comply); Carroll, 400 Md. at 181, 929 A.2d at 28 (“[I]f a proper [c]ertificate has not been filed, the condition precedent to maintain the action has not been met and dismissal is required by the Statute once the allotted time period [for filing the certificate] has elapsed.”); see also Tranen v. Aziz, 304 Md. 605, 612, 500 A.2d 636, 639 (1985) (explaining that the “statutory context of [the Act's] directives plainly shows that compliance with them is mandatory and that noncompliance mandates dismissal”).

The District Court, applying the law of Maryland, dismissed Lewis's claim for failure to comply with the filing requirements of the Act, precipitating her appeal to the Court of Appeals and, in turn, that court's question to us.

III.

A.

A federal court, in a diversity action, must apply the substantive law of the state in which it sits, including that state's choice-of-law principles. See, e.g., Hood, 395 Md. at 611, 911 A.2d at 842–43. For that reason, the Court of Appeals wants to know whether, if Lewis's suit was filed in a Maryland state court, the filing requirements of the Act would apply. To answer that question, we must look, first, to Maryland law concerning choice of law. In that regard, this Court adheres to the doctrine of lex loci delicti. See Hood, 395 Md. at 615, 911...