WHAT CAME FIRST—YOUR INTEREST IN MEDICINE OR LAW?

I was always interested in both. I had been trained in first aid and CPR in my teens, and as an ocean lifeguard I made rescues where I had to administer first aid for some pretty severe injuries, including a victim with a broken neck, which piqued my interest in medicine. By the same token, in my junior year of high school I received a traffic citation for a collision that was not my fault. I took the matter to court myself on my 18th birthday and won my case. The fact that I had the ability to change a legal outcome to the correct one fascinated me and made me interested in becoming a trial lawyer.

BEFORE MEDICAL SCHOOL, WAS YOUR LEGAL PRACTICE FOCUSED ON PHARMACEUTICALS, BIOLOGICS AND MEDICAL DEVICES OR WERE YOU A GENERAL PRACTITIONER?

I joined a large Philadelphia law firm and practiced general commercial litigation. Most of my cases involved business disputes, personal injury cases or insurance coverage litigation. One of my cases involved a complicated insurance claim for medical malpractice. I needed to learn the basic science of the drug's effect on the body, the clinical basis for its administration (and thus the medical error) as well as the governing legal and regulatory standards, which was when I began thinking that law and medicine could be a fascinating combination.

WHAT MADE YOU FINALLY GO FOR YOUR MEDICAL DEGREE?

When I was a third-year associate, my roommate was riding his bicycle and was run off the road by a delivery truck and hit his head. When I went to the emergency department to see him, there was only a single resident on duty. We had mutual friends, and when I told him I had always been interested in medicine, he asked me to "assist" him by holding a set of forceps in position while he located and sutured a ruptured artery beneath the skin in the patient's forehead. That was it for me. My earlier interest in medicine came rushing back to me, and I decided right there I was going back to school.

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