Bradley J. Goewert

As a shareholder of the firm's Health Care Department, Brad serves as the supervising attorney for the Health Care Liability Practice Group in the Delaware office. He has 30 years of litigation experience in Delaware, Florida and Pennsylvania, and the vast majority of this experience is medical malpractice cases since he focuses his practice in the areas of defense of physicians, nurses, hospitals, nursing homes and other health care liability matters involving large exposure and complex cases. Other areas of his practice are devoted to significant general liability matters, including premises liability, automobile liability, product liability and professional negligence. 

Brad estimates that he has handled several hundred health care liability matters. He has tried 55 cases and taken almost all of them to verdict, with the vast majority of them resulting in defense verdicts. He has also handled a number of cases resulting in dismissals by stipulation, motions for summary judgment or directed verdict. 

Brad's representative defense verdicts include the defense of a cardiologist in a 2008 trial involving the use of the drug Amiodarone, and a subsequent death involving pulmonary toxicity; the successful defense of a hospital in 2010 involving a patient who coded in the ED, was resuscitated for a half an hour with no pulse or respirations, was pronounced dead, and then a half an hour later, a nurse found the patient had come back to life and was breathing; and the successful defense verdict in 2011 of an interventional radiologist by rebutting a statutory presumption of negligence where a surgery is performed on the wrong organ.

In one notable case, Brad successfully defended a pulmonologist in 2010 who was alleged to have breached the standard of care by failing to give the 46-year-old decedent informed consent, including the risk of death, prior to performing a bronchoscopy with transbronchial biopsy. Prior to trial, the defense convinced the court that the plaintiffs must prove not only that the physician failed to inform the patient of risks and alternatives, and the undisclosed risk materialized causing injury, but also that a reasonable patient in the position of decedent would have declined to undergo the procedure had she been properly informed. The jury found in favor of the physician on this newly recognized proximate cause standard for informed consent cases, and the decision was affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court.

After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Florida in 1984, Brad obtained his juris doctor from Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans in 1988. Prior to joining Marshall Dennehey in 2001, Brad practiced in Florida as a partner with Gunn, Ogden and Sullivan, where he represented one of the largest operators of health care facilities in United States. Brad is board certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar. He then practiced in Pennsylvania for several years before coming to Delaware in 2003.  In 2016 he was elected to the membership of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA), an invitation-only organization comprised of the most highly accomplished trial lawyers and judges in the country. Brad has also been awarded an AV® Preeminent™ rating by Martindale-Hubbell.