By CAROLYN SUSMAN
DATE: August 18, 1996
PUBLICATION: The Palm Beach Post
Ted Babbitt, in short, can be a thorn in the side of the medical community, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
The New York-born medical malpractice and product liability lawyer is at the top of his heap, professionally speaking. His curriculum vitae includes a long list of prestigious professional associations he’s joined, committee memberships he’s earned and legal publications he’s produced.
And for the past two years, Babbitt, 54, has provided free legal advice to a statewide watchdog group called the Association for Responsible Medicine, which is fighting for health-care reforms.
Colleague and friend Bob Montgomery – also a successful malpractice lawyer – calls him “one of the foremost medical malpractice attorneys in the country. Exquisitely prepared. Very persuasive.”
Persuasive enough to have been the first lawyer in Palm Beach County to obtain a $1 million malpractice verdict.
“And probably the first in the state,” Montgomery says.
Persuasive enough in a courtroom to make those he comes up against think twice about facing him. St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach recently opted for arbitration in the case of a woman who died of an amniotic fluid embolism. Her family was represented by Babbitt.
No one who knew Babbitt when he was in high school would have dreamed he would be this successful.
He was, admittedly, a terrible student at North Miami High School. His life consisted, he said, of near-failure academically while working his way through. He was a meat-cutter and had a paper route. But he had no time for extracurricular activities or keeping his grades up.
“I got straight D’s.”
He joined the Marines after graduation, and it was a drill sergeant who gave him his wake-up call.
“He had a life-and-death control over me and couldn’t spell cat,” he remembers.
That stirred ambition in the man who was later to become so driven that he went through undergraduate and law school in five years. He graduated with honors from the University of Florida.
He met his wife of 34 years, Adrianne, while at Palm Beach Junior College, now Palm Beach Community College.
But Babbitt, who lives in North Palm Beach, didn’t get into malpractice law right away. He wanted to use his undergraduate degree in psychology when he left school.
So, he started out thinking he could be “a combination counselor/lawyer and get people back together,” he says.
But after having 50 divorce cases dumped on him by his first boss, Joseph Farish Sr. – whose son still practices in West Palm Beach – “I quickly got disabused of that. They didn’t want to be counseled by the time they got to a lawyer. They wanted to kill or maim, permanently.”
He wandered into malpractice law when he was with another firm in West Palm Beach, and got a case he found stimulating and exciting. It involved a black woman who went into respiratory arrest and suffered brain damage in the hospital because it took medical personnel – not used to treating black people – so long to recognize her symptoms. He won the case.
“I was fascinated by it. It was the most intellectually challenging thing I had ever done,” says the man who has a life member’s certificate from Mensa, the organization for people with high IQs, hanging on his office wall.
That was 30 years ago. Today, he owns the building in West Palm Beach where he practices, and takes only cases that spark his interest.
Motives questioned
His interest in medical malpractice found a new outlet two years ago when Babbitt offered his services, for free, to the Tampa-based Association for Responsible Medicine, a fledgling group of malpractice victims who banded together to fight for reform.
Babbitt called and offered to help Ray McEachern, who started the organization after his wife was permanently paralyzed during a diagnostic procedure.
The move has brought Babbitt’s motives into question.
Dr. Alvin C. Smith, president of the Florida Medical Association, wrote in a March article in the association journal that ARM was “funded, no doubt, by Mr. Ted Babbitt, a well-known West Palm Beach trial attorney.”
Babbitt says he doesn’t underwrite, or take patients or money from, the group. He does publish their newsletter, The Patient Advocate, four times a year, and offers rides in the private plane he pilots, a twin-engine Piper Seneca, to Tallahassee for lobbying.
He estimates he’s contributed about $5,000 to the organization, both in cash and in services, during the past two years. McEachern says the group’s total operating expenses for 1995 were about $28,000.
“I’ve been a driving force,” Babbitt acknowledges. “I was concerned, however, that ARM not be identified as a front for malpractice lawyers, or as bought and paid for by malpractice lawyers. My initial involvement was a little less obvious than it is now.”
What convinced him to become more open about it? “He didn’t see that as a downside, as long as he maintained his individuality and wasn’t seen as being a shill for the organization,” said McEachern.
Other lawyers also help the group, Babbitt said.
On Aug. 3, the group presented a list to the state Board of Medicine of 36 doctors statewide who each had at least three medical malpractice lawsuits filed against them within three years. Twelve of them are in Palm Beach County.
ARM asked the board to declare that number of lawsuits sufficient to find probable cause – what the board needs to legally publish the names of doctors it investigates for malpractice. Investigations are confidential until probable cause is found, but the lawsuits filed against doctors are public record.
McEachern personally researches lawsuits monthly from six different counties – including Palm Beach County – and publishes the information on his organization’s hotline, which can be reached by calling (813) 933-6236. ARM requests a $25 annual membership fee.
The board listened, was sympathetic, but took no action.
Energy to spare
Babbitt has lived and breathed medicine so long that he uses the terms with ease, but he no longer pores over medical books at the University of Miami, preparing for a case. “I’ve evolved,” he laughs. “I have a researcher who does it for me.”
In his quest to know as much about medicine as his cases demanded, he became a licensed medical technician years ago. He once surprised a doctor – whose deposition he had spent eight hours taking – by showing up in the hospital emergency room that evening in his tech garb, working the night shift.
He is intense, whatever he does. Scuba diving, underwater photography, Spanish classes, jogging at 6 a.m.
He has been politically involved – contributing $13,000 to Democratic Congressman Harry Johnston’s political campaigns. He was appointed by U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, when Graham was governor, to the Governor’s Task Force on Medical Malpractice in 1984.
He chaired the blue ribbon panel that helped restore confidence in the operations of public television station WXEL-42 in 1992. Last year, he waded into the battle about the integrity of the Palm Beach County Judicial Nominating Commission.
“I thrive on it,” Babbitt says of his pace. “There is no more satisfying feeling than facing the chairman of neurosurgery at Harvard and tearing him to shreds!”
Says Montgomery: “He is a daredevil. He really has no fear, and that sends a pretty good message.”
CLOSER LOOK
NAME: Medical malpractice lawyer Ted Babbitt
AGE: 54
EDUCATION: After doing poorly in high school, Babbitt enlisted in the Marines. He then completed his undergraduate and law school classes in only five years, graduating with honors from the University of Florida.
HIS STORY: The first lawyer to win a $1 million malpractice verdict in Palm Beach County, Babbitt has offered free legal advice for the past two years to a statewide watchdog group called the Association for Responsible Medicine, which is fighting for health-care reforms.
QUOTE: `There is no more satisfying feeling than facing the chairman of neurosurgery at Harvard and tearing him to shreds!’
