Claim
Dr. Phil's divorce settlement has finally been revealed as $1 million.
Origin
Since at least February 2021, online advertisements have promised details on a divorce settlement for television psychologist Dr. Phil. One of the ads featured a picture of Phil McGraw and his wife, Robin McGraw. It read: “Dr.
Breach Details
The suit centered around a breach involving medical information of patients at nearly a dozen St. Joseph hospitals that was publicly accessible online using search engines such as Google for about a year starting in February 2011. Without explaining in detail what caused the exposure, the settlement documents note tha…
Why Settle?
- Attorney Daniel Robinson of the Newport Beach, Calif.-based law firm Robinson Calcagnie Robinson Shapiro Davis, which represented plaintiffs in the case against St. Joseph, says the award to his clients is "the highest that I know of" for a breach-related lawsuit. "The breach was pretty egregious. The trend in settlements [for breach cases] is meaningful settlements. A lot of …
Settlement Trends
- Security attorney Ron Raether of the law firm Troutman Sanders LLP hopes other organizations pay attention to the potential costs of a breach, as illustrated by the St. Joseph Health settlement. "Companies need to be better prepared to defend the reasonableness of their procedures, which means vetting carefully what infosec controls are in place and implemented," he says. "Cases ar…
Compensation For Victims
- Under terms of the lawsuit settlement, affected individuals who cash their settlement checks within 90 days could also potentially receive additional rounds of payments depending on how many checks in the previous rounds go uncashed. Based on a formula specified in the settlement, once the bulk of the $7.5 million settlement payout money is distributed and checks cashed, re…
Remedial Efforts
- The settlement documents indicate that St. Joseph's remedial efforts and costs in the wake of the breach included $2 million to retain the consulting firm Deloitte to develop an integrated controls framework and assist in the implementation of a governance, risk and compliance tool to assess application and related systems security. St. Joseph also revamped its security trainingprogram…