Landmark Cases

Conal Doyle was lead counsel in two related civil rights cases that have been reported in the news media around the world, and have been credited with changing the way that the government provides health care to immigration detainees. The combined settlement for both cases was $3.2 million. The case summaries follow: In 2011, Conal Doyle obtained a $1,950,000 settlement in Castaneda v. U.S., 538 F.Supp.2d 1279 (C.D. Cal 2008), affirmed, Castaneda v. U.S., 546 F.3d 682 (9th Cir. 2008), reversed, Castaneda v. Hui,130 S.Ct. 1845 (2010), which is an action by an immigration detainee who suffered a penile amputation …

In December 2013, Conal Doyle obtained the highest medical malpractice jury verdict in the history of Kern County, California. The $26.8 million verdict was recognized by California’s legal newspaper, The Daily Journal, as one of the Top Ten Verdicts of 2013. In McKnight, the plaintiff brought a lawsuit against two intraoperative neurodiagnostic monitors who caused her paralysis by failing to do their jobs during a complex spine surgery. The plaintiff, Charlene McKnight, underwent a spinal surgery on February 23, 2009, and was rendered a paraplegic when a bone fragment was thrust into her spinal cord during surgery. The defendants were …

Conal Doyle was lead trial counsel in this medical malpractice case that settled in March 2015. The plaintiff went into septic shock after she received inadequate treatment for a urinary tract infection and kidney stone obstruction. As a result, all four of her limbs were amputated. This case was governed by MICRA, the California law that limits non-economic damages to $250,000 for “pain and suffering.” Consequently, the settlement amount represented the cost of future medical care and was one of the largest actual recoveries by a medical malpractice plaintiff in California history. Conal Doyle used his intimate knowledge of prosthetics …