Patricia
A. Law

In August 2018 Jeffrey Drost brought his fourteen-year-old son Jake to the office of Shamus Sheridan, a licensed chiropractor, for the screening and physical examination the boy needed to join his high school’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program. Jake carried a questionnaire about his medical conditions that he had filled out and that he and his father had both signed. Sheridan examined him without his father in the room. He knew that he was screening Jake for JROTC and that the program involved strenuous activity, and the form had told him that the boy had some form of congenital heart defect and had undergone multiple heart surgeries, that he took metoprolol for high blood pressure, that he was treating with a doctor for his right ventricle, that he had an internal defibrillator, and that the defibrillator was detached. Sheridan had no training in the heart. He listened to Jake’s heart with a stethoscope, checked boxes on the screening form, made no notes about the boy’s condition, and approved him as capable of strenuous activity for the program.

Jake had been born with a defective right ventricle. Surgeons replaced the defective valve in the first months of his life, and when he was ten they replaced it again and placed a defibrillator to prevent abnormal heart rhythms. In early 2018 the defibrillator became detached and stopped working. He had long been under a cardiologist’s regular care, took metoprolol to prevent arrhythmia and heart failure, and was otherwise able to play and exercise normally, except for sports such as football or hockey that might bring a direct hit to his chest.

In October 2018, two months after the examination, Jake ran a one-hundred-yard dash for the program, collapsed, and died of cardiac arrest. He was fourteen. His parents, Isa Drost and Jeffrey Drost, who had divorced years earlier, sued Sheridan and his corporation, Sheridan Chiropractic, Inc., for wrongful death in the Superior Court of Riverside County, alleging that Sheridan had negligently cleared their son for the program and that the clearance had led to his death from a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. Patricia A. Law represented Jeffrey Drost. The case, Drost v. Sheridan, went to a jury before Judge Irma Poole Asberry.

Fail Him or Refer Him

Sheridan testified that he did not remember seeing Jake. He had reviewed the screening form, and the form was the only medical information he had about the boy when he evaluated him. He admitted that examining Jake without a parent present was in itself below the standard of care for a chiropractor. After learning what the form disclosed, he still believed he had the training to evaluate Jake.

Both sides called chiropractors as experts on the scope of chiropractic practice and the standard of care, and all of them agreed on two points: a chiropractor’s license permits screening children to determine whether they can take part in athletics, and for a child with underlying cardiac conditions like Jake’s the standard of care does not permit the chiropractor to continue the evaluation or to clear the child for strenuous activity. The parents’ experts testified that in evaluating Jake for the program Sheridan made a medical decision, practiced outside the scope of chiropractic, and fell below the standard of care. One of them testified that Sheridan had “two options,” to “fail” Jake or to refer him, because he could not clear Jake given his heart. Law built the father’s proof from what the examiner knew before he signed the clearance: the heart defect, the surgeries, the medication, the cardiology care and the detached defibrillator were all on the page, and the expert testimony separated a routine participation screening from the medical judgment required to assess strenuous exercise for a child with that history.

Sheridan’s expert answered that the examination had been a musculoskeletal assessment of whether Jake could be cleared to do sports. He agreed that regulation limits chiropractors to evaluating and treating the musculoskeletal system and gives them no authority to evaluate or treat heart disease, and that if a chiropractor found a heart abnormality during a child’s sports physical, “the further care, treatment or plan on the basis of the heart would have to be referred out to someone, a medical doctor, such as a cardiologist or even a family doctor.” He agreed that a chiropractor is not trained to assess the effect of strenuous activity on the heart of a minor in Jake’s circumstances, and that making that assessment would be the practice of medicine. He testified nonetheless that Sheridan, who understood Jake was already under a cardiologist’s care, had found no abnormality warranting a referral, had stayed within the chiropractic standard of care in approving him, and had not practiced medicine that day.

The jury returned a special verdict. It found that Sheridan had been negligent in his evaluation of Jake and in clearing him for strenuous physical activity, and that the negligence had caused the parents $7 million in past noneconomic damages and $22.5 million in future noneconomic damages, $29.5 million in all. The finding followed the preparticipation record step by step: the disclosures on the form, the scope of the examination, the clearance for distance running, and the expert evidence about the limits of chiropractic training. The Consumer Attorneys of the Inland Empire named Law its Trial Lawyer of the Year in part for her advocacy in the case.

Sixty-Two Questions, Ten Minutes

On March 6, 2026, the Board of Chiropractic Examiners, the state agency that licenses California chiropractors, filed an accusation against Sheridan, signed by its executive officer, Kristin Walker, with the Attorney General’s office appearing for the Board. The accusation identifies the patient only by his initials; its dates, his age, his cardiac history and his death match the Drost record. On August 31, 2018, it alleges, a fourteen-year-old with an extensive cardiac condition that had required surgery, including an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, came to Sheridan’s office to be evaluated for the Navy Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program at Paloma Valley High School. He and his parents had answered sixty-two health-screening questions, and their answers disclosed that he was under a physician’s treatment, that he had high blood pressure and took medication for it, and that he was under the care of a named doctor. After a consultation and examination of about ten minutes, the accusation says, Sheridan determined that the boy was “medically cleared for unrestricted participation in strenuous activities including the mile run.” He referred him to no pediatric cardiologist and placed no restriction on strenuous activity. On October 5, 2018, the accusation states, the boy suffered cardiac failure during the program’s training and died.

The Board charges gross negligence, for clearing the boy for strenuous activity after his extensive cardiac condition had been disclosed; repeated negligent acts; incompetence; endangering the public, through “inadequate documentation, failure to escalate a complex case” and the failure to refer a high-risk patient for clearance; and failure to create, document and retain accurate records. It seeks revocation or suspension of the chiropractic license issued to Sheridan on January 22, 1988. The Board had taken no final action on the accusation as of October 2026.

A Mother’s Undiagnosed Melanoma

In Posjena v. Regents of the University of California, Law represented the plaintiff in a failure-to-diagnose case: a mother’s malignant melanoma went undiagnosed, and she died. The jury returned a $10.6 million medical-malpractice and wrongful-death verdict against the Regents. A medical case of that kind begins with the symptoms, the tests, the consultations and the treatment choices that were available before the injury, and Law connects each record to the decision made, the information then available, the governing standard of care, the alternatives at hand and the harm that followed, in a chronology that lets a jury test when the decisive information appeared and what the defendant did with it.

Her verdicts against Kaiser Permanente include $3.75 million in one medical-malpractice trial, $3 million in Mundeu v. Kaiser, tried on the failure to obtain informed consent for brain surgery, and $1.3 million in Baksh v. Kaiser, over the failure to stop a blood thinner after an automobile accident. Shtayyeh v. Kaiser, a claim over the failure to diagnose and properly treat a blood-clotting disorder, settled for $1.1 million.

Her $3.2 million medical-malpractice verdict came against DaVita. For the successors in interest of Madelyn Schultz, Law tried a wrongful-death case against two physicians, Jorge Martinez, M.D., and Brent Jacobsen, D.O., and against Universal Health Systems of Rancho Springs, Inc., and the jury returned $3,169,779.75.

Her settled medical cases include $4.9 million with a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai; a $5 million wrongful-death settlement over a radiologist’s and a radiology clinic’s failure to diagnose breast cancer; $3.2 million on a claim that an undiagnosed stroke led to brain damage; $3.15 million over a delay in treating a stroke; $3 million on a claim that a fungal infection went undiagnosed until the patient lost vision; and, in Hamby v. Riverside Medical Clinic, $1.75 million over lost pathology specimens and a failure to diagnose cancer.

Fire Losses Cal Farm Did Not Pay

In Mnatsakanyan v. CalFarm, Law’s client had suffered fire losses that Cal Farm Insurance Company did not pay, and Law tried the claim as insurance bad faith. A bad-faith trial requires the policy, the claim file, the coverage analysis, the communications, the loss evidence and the insurer’s stated basis for withholding benefits; Law brings those records into a single chronology so that the claim-handling decision can be tested at trial against what the insurer knew and when it knew it. The jury returned a $4.7 million insurance bad-faith verdict.

A Delaminated Tire, a Parking Brake, a Wing Screed

In Oliver v. Toyo Tire, tire delamination caused a truck to overturn, and Law obtained a $1.6 million product-liability verdict for the plaintiff. In Eastwood v. Caterpillar, a defective asphalt paver deployed its wing screed into a worker, and the jury returned $1 million. In Fraijo v. Equipment Manufacturer, a defective parking brake disengaged and allowed a scraper to run over its operator; the case settled for $3.5 million. Her other product settlements include $1.8 million with an automobile manufacturer, $1.5 million over a defective fentanyl patch, $1.26 million with a scooter company over a failure to warn, and $900,000 with an automobile manufacturer over defective parts. Each of those cases required evidence on design, manufacture, warnings, testing, product performance and alternative causes, and on the sequence connecting the alleged defect to the injury, the engineering behind the harm.

Five Trials a Year

Law was born in San Francisco to Scottish immigrant parents, and the family settled in the Inland Empire. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Riverside, and her law degree at Whittier College School of Law in 1992, and she founded Patricia A. Law & Associates in Rancho Cucamonga, building the practice while raising her daughter as a single mother. She represents plaintiffs in medical malpractice, wrongful death, catastrophic injury, product liability and insurance bad-faith cases, has tried more than one hundred matters before juries and in binding arbitration, and still tries or arbitrates about five cases a year. Her verdicts and settlements total more than $175 million, among them nine seven-figure verdicts, a $17.5 million settlement with a rental company for two plaintiffs burned in a tank explosion, and, in 2023, her first eight-figure verdict.

She holds the rank of Advocate in the American Board of Trial Advocates, a rank that requires at least ten civil jury trials, and she became the first woman to serve as president of its San Bernardino–Riverside chapter, a chapter of an organization whose membership is reserved for experienced trial lawyers. The Western San Bernardino County Bar Association gave her its Charles Althouse Lifetime Achievement Award for 2024–2025. She is a member of the Leo A. Deegan Inn of Court, works in Riverside County’s Women of the Bar Mentor Program, lectures and serves as a panelist for the Consumer Attorneys of California, and speaks to women’s groups about balancing home and career from her own years as a single mother and trial lawyer. She gives to veterans’ organizations, women’s shelters, children’s research hospitals and her church.

Her mentoring of younger lawyers passes along the work behind a trial record: preparing an expert examination, deciding which medical disagreement the jury will have to resolve, preserving an issue, and continuing to represent a client as a verdict moves into post-trial proceedings.

Of her clients she has said, “I develop deep and lasting relationships with my clients. I get to know their families.” They have her cell phone number and can reach her in the evening or on the weekend. “I feel very privileged,” she has said, “to help my clients in the darkest hours of their lives.” She has thought about slowing down, and has decided to wait until her daughter graduates from law school in 2028, so that the two of them can try cases together.