The $84 Million Fairview Malpractice Verdict: A Chest Pain Complaint, a Missed Cardiac Workup, and What Patients and Families Should Know

According to reporting in Minnesota Lawyer and the Minnesota Star Tribune, Reece Devlin was 53 years old, originally from Australia, a partner at Ernst & Young, and living in Minneapolis. In October 2022 he went to the M Health Fairview Clinic Uptown with chest pain. He carried several cardiac risk factors that were documented in his history, including coronary artery calcium, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

The physician assistant who saw him, Jeffrey Schmidt, ordered an electrocardiogram. It came back normal. The family's complaint alleges that Schmidt went no further: no cardiac workup was ordered, no stress test or echocardiogram was offered, and Devlin was not told that a serious heart problem could be the cause of his chest pain. About three months later, Devlin had a virtual follow-up visit. That appointment, as reported, concerned managing his blood pressure, and the complaint alleges the earlier chest pain complaint was never revisited.

Devlin died on January 29, 2023, while working out in his basement, roughly a week after the virtual visit. The cause was a heart attack. An autopsy found blockages in three of his coronary arteries, one of them about 95 percent blocked. That autopsy is the fact that makes a case like this dangerous for a defendant: it shows that the disease a workup is designed to catch was not only present, it was advanced.

Devlin's wife, Jean Devlin, brought a wrongful-death suit against Fairview Health Services. On September 29, 2026, a Hennepin County jury found that Schmidt was negligent and that his negligence directly caused Devlin's death. It awarded more than $84 million. The breakdown reported by Minnesota Lawyer is $4.75 million for loss of financial support and $7.5 million for loss of companionship, plus $9.96 million for future loss of financial support and $62.5 million for future loss of companionship, which together come to about $84.71 million.

The family was represented by Brandon E. Thompson of Ciresi Conlin LLP. Thompson told Minnesota Lawyer that while no verdict can compensate for the loss of Reece Devlin, the jury's decision reflects the value of a life. The Minnesota Medical Association, writing about the award, described it as among the largest medical malpractice awards in the state's history.

It is worth being precise about what a jury verdict is and is not. A finding of negligence by a jury is not the same thing as an unproven allegation in a freshly filed complaint. Twelve people heard the evidence and decided. At the same time, a verdict is not the end of the road, and a large number on a verdict form is not a check that has cleared. The next section explains why.

Fairview disputes the result. In a statement reported by Minnesota Lawyer, the health system said, "We respectfully disagree with the jury's verdict and continue to believe the care provided was evidence-based." Fairview added that it is reviewing the verdict and evaluating its legal options, and that it could not comment further while the matter remains in litigation. In its answer to the suit, Fairview had denied that the care was negligent, asserted that it was consistent with accepted standards of medical practice, and argued that the death resulted from a medical complication or an underlying and preexisting disease process. Those positions are the defense's, and they have not been set aside by the verdict so much as rejected by this jury on this record.

A verdict of this size usually faces two more tests before anyone is paid. The trial judge can be asked to reduce the award through a process called remittitur, where the court decides a figure is excessive and offers the plaintiff a lower number or a new trial. And the losing side can appeal. Minnesota has seen exactly this play out: in 2022 a federal jury in the state awarded $110 million to a college student in Thapa v. St. Cloud Orthopedic Associates over an inadequately treated knee injury, and that award was later cut to about $10 million. We mention that case not to predict what happens here, because no one can, but to make the point honestly. A headline number is a starting point for post-trial motions and appeals, not a final accounting.

So the accurate way to read this story is in two parts. A jury has found that a man with chest pain and real cardiac risk factors was not worked up, and that the failure cost him his life. And that finding is now subject to the ordinary machinery of post-trial motions and appeal, which Fairview says it is considering.

Cases like this turn on the standard of care, meaning what a reasonably careful clinician should have done when this patient presented. According to the Minnesota Medical Association's account, the parties did not actually fight about what the standard required. They fought about whether the facts showed it was met. That is a common and telling posture, because it moves the whole dispute onto the records.

A normal EKG is the detail that fools people, including some clinicians. An electrocardiogram captures the heart's electrical activity in a single moment, and it can look entirely normal in a patient whose coronary arteries are badly narrowed. That is why the 2021 American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology chest pain guideline treats the EKG as a first step rather than the answer. For a patient with chest pain and risk factors, the guideline contemplates measuring cardiac troponin, the blood marker that rises when heart muscle is injured, and considering further testing such as a stress test or imaging to look for the blocked arteries an EKG cannot see. Devlin's documented risk factors, the coronary calcium, the high blood pressure, and the high cholesterol, are exactly the features that raise the odds that chest pain is cardiac and push a careful clinician toward that further testing.

This is the same category of failure we describe in our article on diagnostic errors, the hidden epidemic. Missed heart attacks sit in the small group of conditions, alongside strokes, cancers, and sepsis, where a short delay is the difference between a treatable problem and a fatal one. The question in those cases is rarely whether the tests exist. It is whether anyone ordered them, and the chart usually answers that question one way or the other.

The family did not rely only on a claim that the care was careless. The complaint also raised what Minnesota law calls negligent nondisclosure. The idea is that a patient has a right to be told about the significant options for diagnosis and the risks of declining them, so the patient can make an informed decision about his own care. The complaint alleged that Schmidt failed to tell Devlin that a cardiac workup was an option and failed to explain the risks of not pursuing one. As the complaint put it, "Mr. Schmidt knew, or should have known, that there were significant risks associated with not pursuing a cardiac workup."

Most people associate the duty to disclose with surgery consent forms. It is broader than that. The theory here is that even in an ordinary clinic visit, a patient is owed enough information to understand that his chest pain might be his heart and that there are tests that could find out. If that information is never offered, the argument goes, the patient never gets the chance to say yes to the workup that might have saved his life. For patients reading this, the practical lesson is simple. You are entitled to ask what a normal test does and does not rule out, and to ask what the next test would be if the first one is reassuring but your symptoms are not.

We flag this theory because it rarely makes the headlines and because it matters to how one of these cases is built. A defendant can argue the first test was reasonable and still be exposed on the separate question of whether the patient was told what was being left undone.

A verdict against a large health system is not proof that the system is dangerous, and it would be wrong to read it that way. Fairview and M Health Fairview treat an enormous number of patients, and one jury's finding about one patient's care says nothing about anyone else's visit. What the case does offer is a template for recognizing a particular kind of harm, the kind where a cardiac symptom was logged, a single reassuring test was run, and the trail went cold.

If you or a family member reported chest pain, shortness of breath, or similar symptoms to a clinic or emergency department and were sent home after a normal EKG, and a heart attack or serious cardiac event followed, the Devlin case shows the questions worth asking. Were troponin levels checked? Was any further testing discussed? Were your documented risk factors weighed, or set aside? The answers live in the medical record, not in anyone's memory of the visit.

This is the private-hospital counterpart to a story we have already covered on the federal side. Our article on the Biloxi VA hospital misdiagnosis lawsuit describes a nearly identical pattern, a 53-year-old man with chest pain sent home and dead within a day, but because that was a VA facility, the claim runs under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the United States rather than as a state-court case against a private system. The medicine is the same. The legal machinery is completely different, which is why getting the right kind of lawyer early matters so much. Our article on emergency room negligence covers how these failures happen in the acute setting.

Minnesota gives you less time than you would guess, and the clock does not pause for grief. A medical malpractice claim generally must be commenced within four years from the date the cause of action accrued, under Minnesota Statutes section 541.076. When the malpractice results in death, the wrongful-death claim is governed by section 573.02, which generally requires the action to be commenced within three years of the date of death and in no event beyond the limit set by section 541.076. The interaction of those two statutes is not something to work out on your own after a loss, and the safe assumption is that the shorter period controls.

Three or four years can feel like plenty. It is not, once you see what has to happen inside it. The complete records have to be gathered, not the summary a portal spits out but the full chart, including the visit notes, the EKG tracing and its time stamp, the documented risk factors, and any record of what options were and were not discussed. A qualified physician has to review the care and be willing to say the standard was breached and that the breach caused the death. In Minnesota, malpractice cases also carry an expert affidavit requirement early in the litigation, which means the medical review cannot wait until the end.

Waiting is the expensive mistake here. The clock is already running, and it does not wait for you to feel ready. The honest time to ask whether you have a claim is while the answer can still help, not after a deadline has quietly closed the door. If you are unsure whether your situation is already time-barred, that uncertainty is itself the reason to ask now rather than later. Our article on the statute of limitations for medical malpractice explains how these deadlines work and how easily they are missed.

If a cardiac event followed a visit where chest pain was waved off, the first practical step is to get the complete medical records rather than a discharge summary. For a case like this, the documents that decide everything are the clinic or emergency notes, the EKG tracing and the exact time it was taken, every lab result and its time stamp, the clinician's written exam and reasoning, the list of risk factors in the history, and any note of what testing was discussed or declined. Read together, those records show whether a cardiac cause was investigated or assumed away.

The second step is to have the care reviewed by a physician who can say whether the standard was met, because a family's suspicion is not evidence and a lawyer's hunch is not either. These are not cases for a general practice that files a form and hopes. The medicine is technical, the Minnesota deadlines and the expert affidavit rule are unforgiving, and a claim built poorly at the start is hard to repair later. Our article on choosing a medical malpractice attorney explains what to look for.

If you are not sure whether what happened was malpractice, or whether you are still inside Minnesota's window, that is exactly the kind of question worth asking early. A short, confidential conversation can tell you whether there is a claim and which deadline governs it, and there is no cost to finding out. The Devlin verdict is one family's case, but the pattern it exposes, a logged cardiac symptom and a workup that never came, is one worth recognizing before the deadline decides it for you.