Former Defense Lawyers Switch Sides

Last year, David Couch and M. Darren O’Quinn had the dubious distinction of being on the losing side of the biggest jury verdict in Arkansas history.

The two partners in the Little Rock law firm of Dover & Dixon defended the Rich Mountain Nursing Home at Mena, which was ordered to pay $78.4 million to the family of a 93-year-old patient who died of dehydration after more than five years in the facility.

But that was then.

Nowadays the two are partners in their own boutique firm, Couch O’Quinn PLLC, and they are suing nursing homes rather than defending them.

“I’ve either gone over to the dark side or I’m now wearing a white hat, depending on which seminar I go to,” Couch said last week.

The new firm, which has Jim Rhodes of counsel, has taken about 15 plaintiff’s cases against nursing homes, Couch said. And while those represent about 75 percent of the firm’s current case load, he said he hopes nursing home litigation will eventually become Couch O’Quinn’s sole practice area.

Dover & Dixon merged in January with Horne Hollingsworth & Parker to form Dover Dixon Horne PLLC. Couch and O’Quinn struck out on their own the same month. Couch O’Quinn was incorporated on Jan. 2.

“We just decided that we didn’t want to be in a big firm anymore, and we’d just become enamored with nursing home litigation,” Couch said.

They had had plenty of experience — “I would say that when we sent all of our files back, and not all of these were open cases, we had over 100 files,” Couch said — but all of it was on the defense side.

When asked why he decided to switch to the plaintiff’s side, Couch said, “It just fits my personality better. I’ve always been for the underdog.”

In nursing home litigation, however, the plaintiffs almost always win. The vast majority of cases are settled out of court, and the few that go to trial are generally won by the plaintiffs. So how is that representing the underdog?

“You are looking at it as a lawsuit,” he said. “I’m looking at it as the patient is always the underdog.”

Other lawyers who spoke off the record suggested that, after the astonishing size of the verdict at Mena, Couch and O’Quinn’s future as nursing home defenders was probably limited anyway.

A number of law firms have made a specialty of nursing home litigation in Arkansas since the arrival in early 1999 of Wilkes & McHugh, the Florida pioneer in the practice. But Couch insists it is neither a crowded nor a competitive field.

“This is the wonderful thing that I didn’t understand when I was a defense lawyer, but the competitors are the defense lawyers. They are all competing for the same client, generally an insurance company,” he said. On the plaintiff’s side, he said, the law firms are willing to share information, strategies and expertise.

When asked if he was implying that there were enough good cases to go around, he said simply, “There are.”

Couch says he may, when the situation warrants, use a strategy similar to the one that beat him and O’Quinn at Mena: Corporate greed is responsible for staffing shortages and inadequate care.

But he still thinks the Mena verdict, which is being appealed, was “inexplicable.”

“Seventy-eight million dollars is an excessive amount of money,” Couch said.