The Librarian Answers
I finally got a chance to look into Mike’s Google Answers challenge about John Edwards’ career as a personal injury attorney. Even though it took me more than a week to get to Mike’s questions, no one from Google Answers had touched it yet.
I found a few good newspaper articles that gave synopses of John Edwards’ career as an attorney:
Candidates 2004: Turning Points: A Legal Star Who Burned for Politics: After his son’s death and two lucrative court wins, Edwards says he wanted a larger stage to do good.
David G. Savage, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Edwards’s (sic) Career Tied to Jury Award Debate
Wendy Davis, Globe Correspondent
The Boston Globe
Monday, September 15, 2003
(Mike had already seen the recent New York Times article, so I didn’t need to share that citation with him.)
Based on the cases discussed in these and many other news articles, it appears that Edwards did not win most of his cases by linking cerebral palsy to medical errors in the delivery room. Two of his major cases involved a young girl getting stuck in a wading pool drain and suffering severe injuries as a result and a girl who suffered brain damage when the doctor chose not to perform a caesarean section even though she was in the breech position. (I did not find an article that labeled the brain damage as “cerebral palsy.”) He became known for getting landmark settlements for his clients.
As far as I can tell, the claim that he won most of his cases by linking cerebral palsy to doctors’ errors isn’t true, so I don’t need to get a transcript of a case or point Mike to one.
Citations for four articles about the link between cerebral palsy and delivery procedures are:
TITLE: Etiology of cerebral palsy.
AUTHOR: Lawson,-R-D; Badawi,-N
SOURCE: Hand Clinics. 2003 Nov; 19(4): 547-56
This article seems to indicate that cerebral palsy is caused by a number of factors and may not be directly caused by any errors in the delivery room. I couldn’t find it online.
There’s also:
TITLE: Labor and delivery factors in brain damage, disabling cerebral palsy, and neonatal death in low-birth-weight infants.
AUTHOR: Qiu,-H; Paneth,-N; Lorenz,-J-M; Collins,-M
SOURCE: American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 2003 Oct; 189(4): 1143-9
TITLE: Cerebral palsy and clinical negligence litigation: a cohort study.
AUTHOR: MacLennan,-A; Robinson,-J
SOURCE: BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. 2004 Jan; 111(1): 92-3
Editorial: Birth and the origins of cerebral palsy.
AUTHOR: Paneth,-N
SOURCE: New England Journal of Medicine. 1986 Jul 10; 315(2): 124-6
(There are many more medical articles about cerebral palsy. These are just four I selected for Mike.)
How did I find the information? Well, I didn’t use Google. I went to John Edwards’ campaign Web site to see what kind of materials they might have available there. I didn’t spend too much time on the site. I just looked at his bio and maybe one or two other things and that was it. I realized if anyone had compiled a summary of Edwards’ career as an attorney, it would probably be a journalist, so I went to a commercial news database to search some news sources. I was able to locate some satisfactory articles there. Just for fun, I played around in a legal database for a little while to see if I might be able to locate any cases. I don’t do a lot of legal research in real life, so I’m not that adept at it and I wasn’t able to locate any materials. Mike only wanted a case about cerebral palsy if that is indeed how Edwards earned most of his money. Since the major cases didn’t seem to have anything to do with cerebral palsy, I decided not to spend more time trying to find a transcript. Finally, I went to a medical database to see what articles I could find about the link between delivery room problems and cerebral palsy. Some of you might be totally amazed by my access to databases, so let me just say that all of the databases are available to me through a local library. I could even access them remotely.
I chose to use commercial databases over the Internet for several reasons. 1) I’m very familiar with the content in the databases. 2) It’s more direct, especially for Mike’s request for a reputable medical journal article. I know the medical database is going to give me citations for medical journal articles. I don’t know what I’m going to find on the Web if I do a general search. I might have to sift through many Web pages before I find one that cites a medical journal article. 3) Because I use some of those databases frequently, I know exactly how to search to find precisely what I need. I don’t know how I would have composed the search in an Internet search engine to get what I was looking for in the same manner in the same time frame. 4) I knew that the databases were going to give me what I was looking for from good sources. I don’t know for certain that any of that stuff exists on the Web (except the medical. databases available through PubMed) and I don’t know anything about the sites a search would potentially return. I might have to spend a lot of extra time evaluating a Web site. I already know something about the sources the databases use.
I didn’t really keep track of time while I was working on this, but it took me at least two hours to find, evaluate, and gather the materials, then maybe another 30 minutes to type and format a report for Mike. He offered $20 on Google Answers for this research. That’s less than $10 an hour, which is less than what I make in my day job. One reason his question may not have been picked up is because people didn’t think $20 was worth the effort.
Other than hearing from Mike that he cancelled his Google request so it’s safe for me to blog this, I’m not sure what he thinks about what I found for him. (I didn’t want him to get charged $20 if someone accidentally found my blog post and could point him to it.)
I feel like I need to slap my political disclaimer on here: I’m not writing about Edwards because I support Edwards or encourage anyone else to. If Mike had asked about spotted skunks, you would have just read a whole bunch of stuff about spotted skunks. (And it probably would have been much more interesting, too.)
Addendum 2/21: A journalist I talked to this evening recommended a number of pages in the News and Observer’s special section about John Edwards, like a timeline of his career and a list of articles about him in other news sources.
Addendum 2/26: Mike paid me for responding to his inquiry.
Addendum 10/22: Liz Donovan has a great post on WeBlog about the value of a librarian because of this exchange with Mike.
