Riggs v.Nordquist
Filed 7/16/12 Riggs
v.Nordquist CA4/1
PUBLISHED IN OFFICIAL REPORTS
California
Rules of Court, rule 8.1115(a), prohibits courts and parties from citing or
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as specified by rule 8.1115(b). This
opinion has not been certified for publication or ordered published for
purposes of rule 8.1115.
COURT OF APPEAL, FOURTH
APPELLATE DISTRICT
DIVISION ONE
STATE OF CALIFORNIA
PATRICIA
RIGGS,
Plaintiff and Respondent,
v.
WILLIAM
D. NORDQUIST, D.M.D., et al.,
Defendants and Appellants.
D059272
(Super. Ct. No. 37-2009-00099806-CU-MM-CTL)
APPEAL
from an order of the Superior Court of
Meyer, Judge. Affirmed.
William D. Nordquist, D.M.D., and his
professional corporation (together, Dr. Nordquist) appeal from an order denying
a motion for judgment notwithstanding
the verdict (JNOV). Dr. Nordquist
contends that because respondent Patricia Riggs did not present standard of
care testimony, the trial court should have granted a JNOV and entered judgment
in his favor. We reject his argument and
affirm the order.
FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND
Dr.
Nordquist replaced Riggs's removable upper denture with a full denture that was
fixed to dental implants. He then
extracted her remaining lower teeth and replaced them with a full denture that
was fixed to implants. Riggs experienced
difficulty with her new dentures, including teeth hitting each other, biting
her lips or cheeks and difficulty with eating and speaking. Dr. Nordquist created a new set of dentures,
but Riggs experienced similar problems.
After several unsuccessful attempts to fix the problems, Dr. Nordquist
told her to come back in six months.
Riggs obtained dental treatment elsewhere and sued Dr. Nordquist for,
among other things, professional
negligence and abandonment.
The matter proceeded to trial. As relevant to this appeal, the jury returned
verdicts finding Dr. Nordquist was negligent in his diagnosis or treatment of
Riggs and that he had abandoned her. The
jury awarded Riggs a total of $197,000 in compensatory damages. Dr. Nordquist filed motions for a new trial
and for JNOV. Each motion noted the
absence of any expert testimony stating that Dr. Nordquist violated the
applicable standard of care for treatment or abandonment. The trial court denied the JNOV motion
without comment, but granted a new trial on the ground the verdict was
"against [the] law" explaining how the testimony of Riggs's expert
witness, Dr. Winston Chee, failed to establish the standard of care or breach
of the standard of care. Dr. Nordquist
appeals from the order denying the JNOV motion.
DISCUSSION
The sole
issue on appeal is whether the trial court erred when it denied Dr. Nordquist's
JNOV motion. Dr. Nordquist contends that
the trial court's reason for granting a new trial, insufficiency of the
evidence, applied equally to the JNOV motion and that the trial court should
have granted a JNOV and entered judgment in his favor. We examine this issue by reviewing the
applicable standards of review for JNOV and new trial motions and explain why
the trial court did not err in denying the JNOV motion.
A. Standards of Review
Motions for
JNOV and for a new trial constitute different procedures for "[obtaining]
a judgment contrary to the verdict rendered by a jury." (Teitel
v. First Los Angeles Bank (1991) 231 Cal.App.3d 1593, 1602.) "A new trial motion allows a judge to
disbelieve witnesses, reweigh evidence and draw reasonable inferences contrary
to that of the jury, and still, on appeal, retain a presumption of correctness
that will be disturbed only upon a showing of manifest and unmistakable
abuse." (Fountain Valley Chateau Blanc Homeowner's Assn. v. Department of
Veterans Affairs (1998) 67 Cal.App.4th 743, 751 (Fountain Valley).) The trial
court has wide latitude in deciding a new trial motion and its ruling is
reviewed for an abuse of discretion. (
"The court may grant a new trial even though there [is] sufficient
evidence to sustain the jury's verdict on appeal, so long as the court
determines the weight of the evidence is against the verdict." (Candido
v. Huitt (1984) 151 Cal.App.3d 918, 923.)
In contrast, JNOV motions permit a
party to prevail when the evidence is legally insufficient to support the
verdict, and thus are intended to be " 'dispositive' " motions. (Fountain
Valley, supra, 67 Cal.App.4th at
p. 751.) A trial court may grant a JNOV
motion if there is no substantial evidence to support the verdict. (Tognazzini
v. San Luis Coastal Unified School Dist. (2001) 86 Cal.App.4th 1053,
1057-1058.) In other words, "the
court essentially rules the plaintiff never
can prevail, even if the matter were to be retried." (Dell'Oca
v. Bank of New York Trust Co., N.A. (2008) 159 Cal.App.4th 531, 548,
italics added.) In deciding whether to
grant the motion, the trial court cannot weigh the evidence or assess
credibility (Castro v. State of
California (1981) 114 Cal.App.3d 503, 512) and must view the evidence in
the light most favorable to the verdict, disregard conflicting evidence and
indulge in every legitimate inference to support the verdict (
Construction Corp. (2001) 92 Cal.App.4th 488, 493-494). "On appeal, we determine de novo whether
there is substantial evidence to support the verdict and whether the moving
party is entitled to judgment in its favor as a matter of law." (Id.
at p. 494.)
B. Analysis
The trial court correctly instructed
the jury that to establish her negligence claim, Riggs needed to show that Dr.
Nordquist was negligent and that the negligence was a substantial factor in
causing her harm. It also told the jury
that: "A dentist is negligent if he
fails to use the level of skill, knowledge, and care in diagnosis and treatment
that other reasonably careful dentists would use
in . . . similar circumstances. The level of skill, knowledge, and care is
sometimes referred to as 'the standard of care.' [¶] You must determine the level of skill,
knowledge, and care that other reasonably careful dentists would use
in . . . similar circumstances, based only on the testimony
of the expert witnesses . . . ."
To establish her negligence claim,
Riggs presented Dr. Chee's testimony, which consisted of about 72 pages of
trial transcript. The jury received this
testimony as an exhibit, the trial court quoted from this testimony in its
ruling and the parties exhaustively analyzed this testimony in their
briefs. In granting the new trial
motion, the trial court exercised its discretion to conclude that the verdict
was "against [the] law" because Dr. Chee had failed to adequately testify
as to the standard of care and breach thereof.
Thus, the trial court necessarily reweighed the evidence and drew
inferences different from that of the
jury to conclude "the evidence in the trial that actually took place did
not justify the verdict." (
The granting of the new trial motion
did not "entail a victory for one side or the other. It simply mean[t] the reenactment of a
process which may eventually yield a winner." (Fountain
Valley, supra, 67 Cal.App.4th at
p. 751, italics omitted.) The parties
did not appeal this ruling and we need not address it. Accordingly, we turn to Dr. Chee's testimony
to determine whether the trial court properly denied the JNOV motion because
there was some substantial evidence supporting the jury's verdict (
Television (2008) 162 Cal.App.4th 1107, 1138) or several reasonable
inferences could be drawn from the evidence (Clemmer v. Hartford Insurance Co. (1978) 22 Cal.3d 865, 877-878).
Dr. Chee
testified that Riggs suffered from "incompetent lips," meaning she
could not "get her lips together without forcing them together." He displayed two photographs of Riggs to the
jury. A photograph of her with no
dentures in place revealed that her lips sealed while at rest. The photograph with the dentures in place
showed that her lips did not seal.
Riggs's dentures were "open so much that she couldn't bring her
lips together causing the incompetent
lips . . . ."
He stated that most people with their lips at rest did not look like
Riggs.
Dr. Chee
testified that "space requirements" for dental implants are critical
and that the "vertical dimension" meant the separation of the lower
and upper jaw. He stated that there are
10 different ways of measuring the vertical dimension and that the vertical
dimension needs to be evaluated because some patients are tolerant and others
are intolerant, and dentists providing treatment should assume a patient is
intolerant. Vertical dimension is
considered a "big issue" in dentistry because
"over-[opening]" the vertical dimension can "cause a host of
problems." Dr. Chee opined that the
problem Riggs experienced was typical of what happens "when you over-open
[the] vertical dimension."
Dr.
Chee further explained that the dentures should dictate the position of the
implants so that problems associated with the vertical dimension can be worked
out. As to Riggs, "the prudent way to approach things would
be to make her a set of dentures with no implants and work out all her problems
of vertical dimension" and then use the dentures as a guide to place the
implants, and that this is the way it is taught and that "everybody does
it that way." He stated that the implants should not be placed and
then the dentures made around the implants.
Dr.
Chee testified that a CT scan is done to determine implant size and orientation
and that a surgical guide is then used to place the implants. Dr. Chee stated that where there are no
teeth, it would be "very difficult" to place implants without using a
surgical guide. When asked whether it
was below the standard of care to not use a surgical guide for a patient
without teeth such as Riggs, Dr. Chee responded that it was "not a clear-cut
question," but that it was "really not prudent to place implants
without some kind of guidance . . . ."
Dr.
Chee stated that anyone practicing in the field of implant dentistry should use
at least two or three methods to measure the vertical dimension and that the
standard of care required that adequate measurements be taken ahead of time and
that it would be outside the standard of care to not do so. However, Dr. Nordquist did not take a CT of
Riggs or use a surgical guide, and Riggs's chart did not note that Dr.
Nordquist adequately measured and planned for the vertical dimension. This evidence suggested to Dr. Chee that the
failure to adequately measure and plan for the vertical dimension turned out to
be a large problem for Riggs. Riggs also
testified that she was never told about measuring for the vertical dimension
and that Dr. Nordquist never took a measuring device to measure her face and
mouth.
In
considering this evidence, the jury could have concluded that the standard of
care required that Dr. Nordquist measure and plan for the vertical dimension,
that he failed to do so and that this failure caused Riggs's problems and
breached the standard of care. However,
this is not the only possible conclusion.
When reevaluating the evidence in connection with the new trial motion,
the trial court could have noted that because Riggs never testified as to
whether she suffered from incompetent lips before Dr. Nordquist treated her,
that Dr. Nordquist's treatment did not cause this problem. Similarly, although Dr. Chee's testimony
suggested that the standard of care required that the vertical dimension be
measured and that Dr. Nordquist did not measure the vertical dimension in Riggs
because Dr. Nordquist did not take a CT scan, use a surgical guide or note
measurements in Riggs's chart, the trial court could have concluded that Dr.
Nordquist used some other method to determine the vertical dimension, and that
Dr. Nordquist did not violate the standard of care in doing so. Dr. Chee's testimony also suggested that the
standard of care required that dentures be made before implants are placed and
that it would have been "prudent" for Dr. Nordquist to have
approached things this way for Riggs.
Dr. Chee, however, never testified that Dr. Nordquist failed to follow
this procedure for Riggs and that this failure violated the standard of care.
Simply
put, some evidence supported the jury's negligence finding and it was possible
for the trial court to draw different inferences from the evidence. Accordingly, the trial court was required to
deny the JNOV motion.
DISPOSITION
The order is affirmed. Respondent is entitled to recover her
McINTYRE, J.
WE CONCUR:
BENKE, Acting P. J.
McDONALD,
J.
