The Charted Defense

The Charted Defense

"Where medicine meets the law — an MD's journey to JD"

Rigorous case analysis, risk management strategy, and healthcare law — built by a physician who has been through litigation and is charting a new course for physician education.

Michael Coleman, MD

Role

Hospitalist & Program Director

Pursuing

Legal Degree

Experience

13+ Years Clinical

Michael Coleman, MD is a hospitalist and Hospital Medicine Program Director with US Acute Care Solutions in Alabama. He earned his BS in Chemistry from The University of Alabama at Birmingham, his MD from UAB School of Medicine, and completed his Family Medicine residency at Baptist Family Residency Program in Montgomery.

Michael has personally been named as a defendant in a medical malpractice lawsuit — an experience that profoundly shaped his understanding of how litigation impacts physicians. That firsthand perspective drives the mission of The Charted Defense.

Now pursuing a legal degree, Michael brings an authentic MD-to-JD perspective that few in the field can offer. His goal: to educate, prepare, and support physicians navigating the legal landscape of modern medicine — because understanding how clinical decisions become legal evidence is a learnable skill.

"Patient harm and physician harm can coexist without canceling each other. Both realities are held simultaneously."

What We Publish

Content Built for Physicians

Every piece starts with what happened clinically, moves into legal interpretation, and ends with what to do differently next shift.

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Case Files

Headline malpractice cases turned into practical bedside risk lessons. Timeline reconstruction, pleadings logic, defense counterfactuals, and charting templates.

Free + Paid Newsletter Podcast

📄

Documentation Defense

Making charting defensibility a repeatable clinical skill. Phrase libraries, micro-checklists, copy-forward safety, metadata-safe late entries, and escalation notes.

Paid Toolkit

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Policy Watch

Translating policy and regulatory changes into physician-level action. CMS changes, telehealth licensure, tort reform, and scope-of-practice legislation.

Free Policy Brief

🔬

Risk Rounds

Scenario-based malpractice prevention training. Interactive case simulations with branching decisions, legal debrief, and defense-grade documentation examples.

Paid Interactive

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The Legal Playbook

How med-mal litigation actually works. Complaint anatomy, discovery, depositions, expert battles, damages framing, settlement dynamics, and trial narrative.

Paid Explainer Series

🛡

Physician Survival Guide

Protecting the physician, not just the chart. Burnout risk controls, contract traps, insurance stacking, board complaint preparedness, and reputation management.

Free Career Strategy

On The Record

A documentary-style premium series. Each season reconstructs a single malpractice case across multiple episodes — turning court records into cinematic storytelling.

10 Seasons Planned

From Complaint to Verdict

Each OTR season takes one real malpractice case and breaks it down episode by episode: the clinical encounter, what went wrong, the legal filings, expert testimony, defense strategy, and the final outcome.

Spanning critical care, obstetrics, radiology, emergency medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics, and institutional liability — OTR is a complete education in how clinical medicine becomes courtroom evidence.

S1: Pressure Injuries & Documentation
S2: The Wrong Blood Thinner
S3: Delayed Diagnosis
S4: Vasopressor Overdose
S5: The 45-Minute Delay
S6: The Five-Minute Read
S7: The Protocol Failure
S8: Discharge & Death
S9: When the Hospital Goes Bankrupt
S10: False Imprisonment

The Wrong Blood Thinner

Hematology, care fragmentation, and a multi-defendant case

In Development

E01

The Patient

Clinical history and the medical context

E02

The Wrong Blood Thinner

The pharmacology and evolving standards of care

E03

The Dueling Medical Experts

When expert testimony defines the case

Educational Resources

Organized by clinical topic and learning objective. Resources designed for practicing physicians who want to practice defensively without practicing fearfully.

Case Analysis Library

Free + Paid

A searchable, specialty-organized archive of malpractice case breakdowns. Filter by clinical area, allegation type, or outcome. Each analysis follows a consistent framework: clinical narrative, malpractice exposure, documentation lessons, and shift-ready takeaways.

Documentation Toolkit

Paid

Defensible note templates, phrase libraries, and micro-checklists for common clinical scenarios. Built from real malpractice cases where documentation failures drove adverse outcomes. Covers admission notes, handoff documentation, discharge summaries, and informed consent.

Litigation Explained

Paid

The full litigation process explained physician-to-physician. From the moment you're served papers through discovery, depositions, expert battles, settlement decisions, and trial. Practical knowledge that most physicians only learn under fire.

Policy & Regulatory Updates

Free

Plain-language policy briefs that translate regulatory changes into "what to change Monday morning." CMS updates, telehealth licensure, tort reform, prior-auth reforms, and scope-of-practice legislation — no partisan framing, just actionable intelligence.

Collaborate With Us

The Charted Defense is building a community of physicians, attorneys, risk managers, and patient safety professionals. Here's how to get involved.

Case Submissions

Know of a case that physicians need to understand? We investigate publicly available cases that carry lessons for clinical practice. Submit a case or topic for consideration.

Guest Contributions

Attorneys, risk managers, and clinical specialists who want to contribute expert perspectives on malpractice trends, defense strategy, or patient safety.

Institutional Partnerships

Hospitals, medical groups, and residency programs interested in incorporating medico-legal education into their training. Custom content and presentation opportunities available.

Media & Speaking

Michael is available for podcast appearances, conference presentations, and media commentary on medical malpractice trends, physician litigation impact, and healthcare law.

Get in Touch

Whether you have a case to share, want to collaborate, or just want to connect — reach out.