A Surgeon Operated on the Wrong Side of His Spine. Warshafsky Settled It for $2.9 Million.

In 2004, Ken Plants went to Dr. Cully White, a Milwaukee spine surgeon, for a disc operation on the right side of his back. White operated on the left side instead. Plants woke with pain and numbness running down his left leg, the opposite side from the one that was supposed to be treated.

When Plants reported the pain, White told him it came from the way he had been positioned on the operating table and sent him to physical therapy. A second surgeon later told Plants the truth: the operation had been done on the wrong site.

The case went to Ted Warshafsky's firm, Warshafsky, Rotter, Tarnoff and Bloch, in Milwaukee County. One of the people who worked it was Werner Reis, the firm's board-certified physician and attorney, who could read the surgical and billing records the way a doctor reads them. By the firm's account, Reis helped establish two things: that White had cut the wrong side, and that the records did not match the procedure he had actually performed. That second point would surface again later in a federal courtroom.

White's insurer settled in 2009, shortly before trial, for $2.9 million. The Wisconsin Law Journal's roundup of that year's results logged the Milwaukee County case at roughly $3 million and named Warshafsky for the plaintiff. Because it resolved as a settlement, there was no verdict to appeal and no reduction.

The settlement did not close the file on White. The Wisconsin Medical Examining Board was notified of the payout and, according to the reporting that followed, took no action against him for years, even as allegations of substandard surgeries dating back to 2004 piled up. White was performing roughly 600 operations a year in Milwaukee at the time. In May 2013, a federal grand jury charged him with 13 counts of health care fraud, alleging he had billed insurers for nerve-monitoring services that were never performed. He pled guilty that November and surrendered his medical license. In April 2014, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman sentenced him to six months in prison and six months of house arrest.