Without a doubt, Goodrich v. Aetna is the most significant case in my career. And it’s also the most significant for me from a personal and emotional standpoint. Dave Goodrich was a deputy San Bernardino County district attorney. Coincidentally, Dave and I had gone to law school together. He was two years behind me at Pepperdine University School of Law. I graduated in ’74, and he graduated in ’76. When he came out to San Bernardino County right out of law school, he went to work for the DA’s office, and I was a young lawyer in Chino, California, handling a variety of cases, including criminal defense.

And I had contact with Dave Goodrich as a prosecutor. He was always a very, very straight ahead, nice person, a very tough prosecutor, but a very fair person. And we became friends through the courts. Then in 1990, mid-90s, roughly 1995 or 1996, I got a call one day from the district attorney for San Bernardino County whose name was Dennis Stout. He called me up one day and he says exactly – I’ll never forget. I get goosebumps when I talk about it.

He says, “Hey, Mike. This is Dennis Stout.” “Yeah, Dennis. What’s up?” “Mike. They killed Dave Goodrich.” “So, what do you mean, they killed? What are you talking about?” He says, “Dave had this cancer, and Aetna wouldn’t treat it, and he died.” He suffered from a disease called leiomyosarcoma. He was insured through the district attorney’s office by Aetna, and he was a member of a local medical group that was involved for Aetna called PrimeCare of Redlands. His in-plan physicians told him that they did not have high-dose chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant capabilities in network, and that they referred him over to the City of Hope. But they had to ask for permission to get it covered by Aetna.

What he went through, then, for the next 18 months was nothing short of a nightmare of run-around, of getting letters saying, “We need to send it to home office,” and all of this. And it took them 18 months to get a final answer. By that time, of course, he went over to the City of Hope and then Saint John’s to get treatment because the doctor had recommended it. And then, after the cancer had spread, then it was too late. And so, he died. And their defense was that number one, that he self-directed his care. [Laughter] And of course, we said, “Self direct? You know, you weren’t dealing with my request for care. I had to go try to survive.”

And he had incurred $750,000.00 of medical bills. And so the jury was told that just before he passed away with his wife at his bedside, they opened a letter denying the benefits, and he went to his grave knowing and thinking that his wife was going to get stuck with a $750,000.00 bill. That was Dave Goodrich’s story.

The first thing they tried to do was to kick us out of court with an arbitration clause. We avoided that. We prevailed. And then ultimately, we went to jury trial. And in that case, the medical doctor we called as a witness said that had he gotten the treatment that was denied it probably would have only extended his life about 14 months. Of course, they said, “Well, you know, it would have happened anyway, and what’s 14 months?” And we said, “Well, you know, 14 months. They may not have been going on cruises or partying. Much of it may have been spent with Terry on his bedside talking to him. But it’s 14 months that he was robbed of.”

And the jury awarded $4.5 million for that 14 months of shortened life expectancy. But they awarded in addition $116 million in punitive damages to punish Aetna for their misconduct and to deter that type of conduct in the future. And so that was a big deal at the time. It got national attention. And honestly, it probably did more to affect my personal career in terms of later cases that I’ve done as a result of the attention that case got.