Getting sued, or even just the fear of it, is one of the greatest hidden drivers of physician stress, burnout, and career dissatisfaction, yet almost no one teaches doctors how to survive it. A malpractice lawsuit can shake your confidence, challenge your identity, and strain your relationships long before you ever step into a deposition. The good news is that preparation, practice, and the right mindset can transform litigation from an overwhelming threat into something you can navigate with confidence. In this episode, we explore what every physician should know about medical malpractice lawsuits and malpractice litigation,, how to navigate a deposition, the conversations that can sabotage your defense, and the emotional toll of being sued, along with practical ways to prepare before you're ever named in a lawsuit. Finally, we share the tools, resources, and hard-earned lessons that help doctors protect their careers without losing themselves in the process.

• Why getting sued changes the way physicians practice medicine long after the case is over.
• How preparation can take you from feeling like you're on the chopping block to walking into a deposition with confidence.
• What you should and shouldn't say while a malpractice lawsuit is ongoing.
• Why understanding plaintiff attorneys' tactics makes you a stronger defendant.
• The communication mistakes that can undermine your credibility.
• How to prepare for a deposition.
• Why shame and isolation can make malpractice harder than the lawsuit itself.
• Practical ways to protect your confidence, career, and mental health after being sued.

Books

• When Good Doctors Get Sued
• How to Survive a Medical Malpractice Lawsuit - Eileen Brenner
• Depositions Are Trial

Podcasts

Doctors and Litigation: The L Word

• Season 1: Approaching D-Day
• Season 3: The Educated Defendant

Courses & Tools

• LEAP (Litigation Education and Performance).
• Use the code STIMULUS100 for $100 off.

Guest: Dr. Gita Pensa is an emergency physician, educator, and litigation performance coach who helps clinicians navigate malpractice lawsuits with greater confidence and less emotional distress. Through speaking, coaching, and her LEAP (Litigation Education and Performance) courses, she works with healthcare organizations, insurers, defense attorneys, and physicians to transform how clinicians experience litigation.

Mentioned in this episode:

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The Out-On-Time Course

Built for emergency clinicians who are tired of chart debt and getting derailed by interruptions and overwhelm. Learn practical, real-time documentation and shift-efficiency strategies to finish your shift and actually leave on time.

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The details

What: A look under the hood of the Unburnable Operating System, and an open Q&A with Scott and Rob.

When: Wednesday, July 22, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern

Cost: Free.

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When another person is upset or angry, our instinct can be to help them lower their emotional temperature by saying something like, "Just calm down," or, "Relax," or, "Take a breath," or, "Look at the facts." However, saying those things when the other person is in the heat of the moment can have the reverse effect from what we were hoping for.

The reason is simple: People who do not feel heard are not ready to hear solutions.

In this episode, we explore the communication strategy of valence matching, why it works at both a psychological and neurological level, and how it can transform interactions with patients, colleagues, consultants, and loved ones. Finally, we show how a few seconds of emotional attunement can save minutes, or even hours, of unnecessary conflict.

💡 Get Rob's Book

Supranormal: A Field Guide for the Impossible Job.

Tools, mindsets, and communication techniques so you don't get eaten alive by a job you're good at.

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We Discuss:

• Why "Calm Down" Rarely Calms Anyone
• The Simple Idea Behind Valence Matching
• Why the Brain Rejects Logic During Conflict
• Content vs Process in Conversation
• Why You Should Match First, Then Move
• Small Words That Create Big Differences
• How to Effectively Thank Patients for Waiting
• How Emotional Connection Shapes Clinical Encounters
• Why an Excellent Clinician Had Consistently Low Patient Satisfaction Scores

Mentioned in this episode:

🧭 UnBurnable | Career Longevity, Burnout Prevention, Self Mastery

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The quality of our attention shapes every interaction we have, yet listening is often the first skill sacrificed when pressure, technology, and time constraints take over. Most clinicians spend years learning what to say, while spending little time learning how to effectively listen. In a healthcare system dominated by tasks, metrics, and efficiency, the ability to slow down and create genuine presence may be one of the most valuable skills we can cultivate.

In this episode, we explore why listening is both a mindset and a practical skill, how to listen more effectively, how small pauses can transform patient care, and why mindfulness extends far beyond meditation. Finally, we examine simple practices that help clinicians stay present, focused, and connected even during the busiest days.

💡 Get Rob's Book

Supranormal: A Field Guide for the Impossible Job.

Tools, mindsets, and communication techniques so you don't get eaten alive by a job you're good at.

Buy it on Amazon

Guest Bio: Dr. Ronald Epstein – internationally recognized family physician, palliative care physician, educator, researcher and writer -- has devoted his career to understanding and improving communication and mindfulness in medicine. His scholarly articles have revolutionized doctors’ view of their work, and his 2017 book, Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness and Humanity shows how becoming mindful can transform healthcare, build strong connections between doctors and patients, and help clinicians flourish while providing the best care for patients.

You can find Ron at www.ronaldepstein.com and learn about his workshops at www.mindfulpracticeinmedicine.com

• Why listening may be the most important clinical skill we rarely teach
• The 90-second habit that changes patient encounters
• What a near-missed surgical complication reveals about hierarchy
• The difference between spending time and being present
• The difference between reacting and responding
• A simple doorknob practice for transitioning between patients
• How "Find Your Feet" helps restore presence during stressful encounters
• Why slowing down often improves performance
• What mindfulness looks like beyond formal meditation

Mentioned in this episode:

Doctoring Done Well | Bite-Sized Wins

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The Out-On-Time Course

Built for emergency clinicians who are tired of chart debt and getting derailed by interruptions and overwhelm. Learn practical, real-time documentation and shift-efficiency strategies to finish your shift and actually leave on time.

Learn More About The Out-On-Time Course

UnBurnable Registration is Now Open

We took the highest yield tools from our 1:1 coaching and created a community-based course with docs who get it and get you.

The UnBurnable Course

Your ability to earn income is your most valuable financial asset. Physicians spend years protecting patients, building careers, and accumulating assets, yet many discover too late that the insurance designed to protect their income is full of loopholes, exclusions, and traps. Disability insurance sounds boring until the moment someone needs it, and then it becomes one of the most emotionally and financially consequential topics in medicine.

In this episode, we explore the hidden realities of physician disability insurance, why employer policies often fail when doctors need them most, and how to think strategically about protecting future income before health problems appear. We also walk through what physicians should do when filing a disability claim, and how to avoid sabotaging the process from the very beginning.

💡 Get Rob's Book

Supranormal: A Field Guide for the Impossible Job.

Tools, mindsets, and communication techniques so you don't get eaten alive by a job you're good at.

Buy it on Amazon

Guest bio: Matthew Wiggins is the founder of Doc Insure and a leading educator in physician disability insurance. Since 2003, he has helped more than 15,000 doctors understand and secure income protection, while pioneering a faster, online-first way for residents, fellows, and attendings to compare personalized disability policies. Through Doc Insure, Matt makes a confusing and often overlooked topic practical, transparent, and easier to navigate so physicians can make informed decisions about protecting their future earnings. Matt and his crew will give you a quote on disability insurance through this link. Or you can set up a call to chat with them directly here.

We Discuss:

• Why most employer disability policies leave physicians underprotected
• How true own-occupation coverage protects a physician’s specialty income
• Why physicians dramatically underestimate their chances of becoming disabled
• The different disability risks facing procedural and cognitive specialties
• Why disability claims often become adversarial and difficult to navigate
• How detailed occupational documentation strengthens disability claims
• Why income documentation determines the value of a disability payout
• How understanding a diagnosis improves the strength of a disability claim
• Why filing timing can affect whether benefits are approved and when payments begin
• Why buying disability insurance during residency protects future insurability

Mentioned in this episode:

Get Out On Time

The Out-On-Time Course gives you the tools to complete your charts on shift, manage overwhelm and interruptions, and create fast, focused, kickass notes, so you can stay out of chart debt and get home on time. Self-paced. 12 hours AMA PRA Category 1 CME.

Learn More About The Out-On-Time Course

UnBurnable Registration is Now Open

We took the highest yield tools from our 1:1 coaching and created a community-based course with docs who get it and get you.

The UnBurnable Course

Doctoring Done Well | Bite-Sized Wins

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Medicine gives you a map. Pre-med, med school, residency, attending. Step by step, no shortcuts. Then one day, the map disappears and you’re there asking, “Now what?”

In this episode, Dr. Mizuho Morrison and I dig into what happens after training, when fulfillment, identity, and control are no longer prescribed. We talk about nonlinear careers in medicine, from part-time clinical work and motherhood to podcasting, entrepreneurship, leadership, and walking away from roles that no longer fit.

We also get into what happened when Mizuho wore a continuous glucose monitor during emergency department shifts, and what it revealed about stress, cortisol, and the real physiologic cost of the job.

This is a conversation about agency, experimentation, and ownership, and how to build a medical career that actually works for your life, not just your training.

💡 Check out our Free Resources specifically designed to address pain points in medical practice💡

Guest Bio: Dr. Mizuho Morrison is a board-certified emergency physician in Southern California and CEO of EM:RAP. A graduate of the Los Angeles County + USC residency program, she has worked in both academic and community emergency medicine and has been a major voice in EM education for more than a decade. Miz was one of the first female EM podcasters, helped launch multiple EM:RAP programs, served as Editor-in-Chief and Senior Medical Director at Hippo Education, and co-hosted Essentials of Emergency Medicine. She is also an entrepreneur and cofounder of 3MD, Three Mommy Doctors, a medical device company that reimagined first-aid kits for kids. She lives in Orange County with her two children.

We Discuss:

• The Train Track Problem in Medical Careers
• Fulfillment Is Not One Standard Career Shape
• Seasons, Experiments, and Knowing When to Move On
• Stress, Cortisol, and the Cost of Shift Work
• Begin Before You Feel Ready
• Reclaiming Agency in a System That Keeps Asking for More

Mentioned in this episode:

Supranormal: A Field Guide for the Impossible Job

Rob's book is for anyone doing high-stakes, human-facing work who's ever thought I wasn't trained for this. Built from 20 years in emergency medicine and thousands of hours coaching physicians, Supranormal delivers the tools, mindset shifts, and communication techniques that don't show up on any board exam, but make all the difference in how you perform, connect, and build a career worth keeping.

Get Supranormal on Amazon

Doctoring Done Well | Bite-Sized Wins

Every other week, a few minutes of career-elevating insight delivered straight to your inbox.

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UnBurnable Registration is Now Open

We took the highest yield tools from our 1:1 coaching and created a community-based course with docs who get it and get you.

The UnBurnable Course

It’s not uncommon for hospitals to provide clinicians with scorecards. While they may seem like a judgment of your quality of work, scorecards rarely provide data that will lead to flourishing in your career. But what if you made your own scorecard, filled with things that were important to you and fully within your control? If you nailed one of those each day at work, what would your experience be like?

In this episode, we explore what happened when Dr. Erin Broderick, a participant in the Unburnable Course, stopped using the hospital’s scorecard as her main definition of success and created a more personal one instead. Erin talks about how she took a new approach to patient satisfaction surveys, one that has eliminated nearly all the stress and distress associated with them.

Finally, we look at how intentional practices during and after a shift made Erin’s work feel joyful and sustainable.

💡 Check out our Free Resources specifically designed to address pain points in medical practice💡

We Discuss:

• Measuring success with a personal scorecard
• A post-shift routine that closes the day
• Closing open loops
• A novel approach to patient satisfaction surveys
• Letting go of metrics that don’t serve you
• Scheduling recovery during the shift
• Extending intentionality beyond the hospital

Mentioned in this episode:

Doctoring Done Well | Bite-Sized Wins

Every other week, a few minutes of career-elevating insight delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign up for our Newsletter

Supranormal: A Field Guide for the Impossible Job

Rob's book is for anyone doing high-stakes, human-facing work who's ever thought I wasn't trained for this. Built from 20 years in emergency medicine and thousands of hours coaching physicians, Supranormal delivers the tools, mindset shifts, and communication techniques that don't show up on any board exam, but make all the difference in how you perform, connect, and build a career worth keeping.

Get Supranormal on Amazon

UnBurnable | Our Cohort-Based Burnout Prevention and Cure Course

We took the highest yield tools from our 1:1 coaching and created a community-based course with docs who get it and get you.

The UnBurnable Course

If you have ever lost it mid-shift, frozen when you should have acted, or spent the next two weeks asking yourself what's wrong with me, you already know what character assassination feels like.

In this episode, we break down a simple and effective reframe that interrupts the self-flagellation shame spiral without making excuses or lowering standards. You will learn how to move from why did I to, of course, how to give yourself a legitimate and hard-earned break, and why self-compassion is not softness but one of the most underutilized performance tools in medicine. Topics include physician burnout, self-compassion, cognitive reappraisal, shame and self-criticism, communication under stress, and physician coaching.

💡 Check out our Free Resources specifically designed to address pain points in medical practice💡

We discuss:

1. Why self-criticism after a hard moment often hurts more than the moment itself
2. The difference between first-order distress and second-order distress
3. What the research on rumination and shame actually shows
4. Why your brain treats harsh self-evaluation like a physical threat
5. The biology of performance under load and why grit has a limit
6. The of 'course' reframe and how to use it in real time
7. Four steps to move from character assassination to context assessment
8. Why suppression makes it worse, and reappraisal changes the signal
9. Pre-shift dread and how to take the shame out of it
10. Why self-compassion is a performance tool, not a soft skill
11. What this reframe is not: excuses, lowered standards, or avoiding accountability
12. How to start today with one sentence

Mentioned in this episode:

Doctoring Done Well | Bite-Sized Wins

Every other week, a few minutes of career-elevating insight delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign up for our Newsletter

Supranormal: A Field Guide for the Impossible Job

Rob's book is for anyone doing high-stakes, human-facing work who's ever thought I wasn't trained for this. Built from 20 years in emergency medicine and thousands of hours coaching physicians, Supranormal delivers the tools, mindset shifts, and communication techniques that don't show up on any board exam, but make all the difference in how you perform, connect, and build a career worth keeping.

Get Supranormal on Amazon

The Out-On-Time Course

Built for emergency clinicians who are tired of chart debt and getting derailed by interruptions and overwhelm. Learn practical, real-time documentation and shift-efficiency strategies to finish your shift and actually leave on time.

Learn More About The Out-On-Time Course

Emergency medicine has an interruption-based workflow. There's no getting around some of that, but recurrent interruptions erode quality of care, accuracy of documentation, concentration, and ultimately the ability to leave work on time. While some interruptions are unavoidable, most are predictable and preventable. Reclaiming control over interruptions is more than a way to improve efficiency; it's about patient safety, reducing medical errors, and safeguarding your mental health. Constant task switching creates cognitive load, contributing to emergency physician burnout and compromising clinical decision-making.

In this episode, we explore tactical and mindset shifts that emergency clinicians can use to reduce interruptions, enhance documentation efficiency, and avoid the hidden costs of task switching. We'll cover practical strategies for managing EKG interruptions, skillful ways to manage nursing questions, and setting boundaries all while maintaining team dynamics and patient care quality. Whether you're an emergency physician, PA, NP, or resident, these evidence-based strategies will help you work smarter, reduce stress, and reclaim control of your clinical day.

Finishing emergency department shifts with a stack of charts to complete gets old fast. This chart debt also contributes to burnout.

We will help you break bad habits and equip you with the skills to walk out the door unencumbered.

Out-On-Time is a course for emergency physicians and clinicians that teaches shift efficiency and real-time documentation, enabling you to write fast, focused charts that bill well and are medicolegally sound.

Learn More About The Out-On-Time Course

We Discuss:

• The Cost of Interruptions in Emergency Medicine
• Not All Interruptions Are Urgent
• The Cognitive Cost of Task Switching
• Becoming a Non-Interruptible Clinician
• Deferring Without Alienating Your Team
• Protecting Focus at the End of the Shift
• Fixing the EKG Interruption Problem
• Asynchronous Communication That Actually Works

Mentioned in this episode:

Supranormal: A Field Guide for the Impossible Job

Rob's book is for anyone doing high-stakes, human-facing work who's ever thought I wasn't trained for this. Built from 20 years in emergency medicine and thousands of hours coaching physicians, Supranormal delivers the tools, mindset shifts, and communication techniques that don't show up on any board exam, but make all the difference in how you perform, connect, and build a career worth keeping.

Get Supranormal on Amazon

So many of our choices are shaped less by desire and more by expectation. We chase prestige, status, or recognition, only to arrive and realize we were climbing the wrong ladder. Beneath burnout and the friction, there’s often the truth that we were never pursuing what we truly wanted. In this episode, we explore the concept of mimetic desire, how it misguides our ambitions, and how to reclaim our decisions. Finally, we examine how fear of judgment and shame shape our careers more than we think, and what it takes to break free.

Guest bio:  Josh Russell, MD, is double board-certified in Emergency Medicine and Palliative Care. He’s held leadership roles as a Chief Medical Officer in telehealth, artificial intelligence, and urgent care systems. He’s an experienced clinician, writer, educator, and medical editor with a passion for making complex topics accessible. 

LinkedIn article that spurred this podcast

Josh’s Website

• Mimetic Desire: Chasing What Others Want
• The Trap of “Should”: Internalized Shame
• The Concentric Circles of Stressors
• Finding What You Really Want
• The Ladder Against the Wrong Wall
• Actionable Reflection Practices

Mentioned in this episode:

The Out-On-Time Course

Built for emergency clinicians who are tired of chart debt and getting derailed by interruptions and overwhelm. Learn practical, real-time documentation and shift-efficiency strategies to finish your shift and actually leave on time.

Learn More About The Out-On-Time Course

Doctoring Done Well | Bite-Sized Wins

Every other week, a few minutes of career-elevating insight delivered straight to your inbox.

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