The Flea Circus

I was rather late to the Flea controversy over his malpractice trial. In fact, I recall seeing just his initial post about the plaintiff’s attorney prior to his site’s take-down. He has quite a following among personal injury attorneys (including posts that have PDFs of his site prior to the take-down):

• Medical Malpractice Trial Starting For Med-Blogger
• Med-Blogger, On Trial For Malpractice, Takes Down Trial
• Med-Blogger Flea, Previously Live-Blogging His Trial, Takes Down Entire Site
• The Flea is Back. Read about this Pediatrician’s first day of trial
• The Flea Explains their Trial Strategy
• The Flea tells us what juries really care about
• The Flea Outlines the Plaintiff’s Complaint against him

I believe the Flea is learning how costly “free speech” can be. I have to agree with the attorneys here, this is about as foolish a manner a physician could act prior to and during a trial—he’s going to be the textbook example for years to come. He waved several red flags in front of the bull…and the bull charged. One of the red flags: