Colorado Nursing Home Abuse Lawyers

Welcome to the Law Offices of John Robert Holland, P.C.

We specialize in advocating for the rights of people. In our practice we focus on nursing home and assisted living abuse and neglect. We also focus on civil rights. We are passionately committed to fighting for the rights of those who are not always able to advocate for themselves. We represent the elderly and disabled who have been abused or neglected in care facilities and individual plaintiffs in the vindication of their civil rights against the government and corporations who violate them, including employers.

Our cases share a common goal of holding the powerful accountable for the victimization of those in their sway.

We focus on corporate and governmental abuses of the most vital rights and interests of the people.

We are also interested in exposing willful, malicious, and outrageous conduct.

We believe that the privilege of practicing law comes with the obligation to serve the interests of the public. We advocate for the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the laws of the United States and of Colorado.

Our office is a small litigation practice. We are a boutique, not a factory. We often focus as a team on individual cases. Each of us knows each case. Our goal is to provide personal and involved representation to each of the people we represent. We engage in serious and sometimes very complex litigation, often involving governments and major corporations.

When we decide to do a case, it is because we believe it is important. It is not just about money, although obviously cases involve money.

The principle focus of our practice is on serious injustices and social wrongs. What we do, what we choose to work on, is not so much limited by the precise kind of case, as it is by the seriousness of the injustice that we perceive.

Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect

Why do we sue nursing homes and assisted living facilities?

We sue nursing homes because they must be held accountable. The government regulates them but does not much act on what it finds.  Nursing homes are cited, re-cited, then re-licensed but then inevitably allowed to continue to operate.  Very few are closed. Occasionally they are fined.

John’s own personal experience with his mother being neglected in a nursing home lead to his interest in this area.  He was in law school at U.C.L.A.  His mother was in a coma and needed only to be frequently repositioned.  Because she was not, she quickly developed a pie sized pressure ulcer on her spine, which he discovered when he picked her up to hug her.  We understand the permanent feelings that come from such experiences.

We have been engaged over the years in numerous public interest challenges concerning the rights of disabled and elderly persons. This has evolved as well into a practice redressing serious and profound injuries and deaths to such persons. A major part of our practice is devoted to doing just that.

We helped to establish the legal right to high quality nursing and rehabilitation care services for nursing home residents in safe, sanitary, accessible environments that maintain and promote the exercise and retention of their civil rights.

We did this in the landmark lawsuit against the Federal government, in Smith v. Heckler, which struck down the previous nursing home inspection system and replaced it with a patient focused survey process and also contributed to the development and passage of the OBRA ’87, the Nursing Home Reform Act. John served on one of the Institute of Medicine committees responsible for the recommendations to Congress that culminated in the passage of OBRA. The Smith case was also the subject of a Sunday Night Movie that focused on Michael Patrick Smith entitled 'When you Remember me' with Kevin Spacey and Fred Savage.

We believe that one of most important things that most nursing homes understand is money.  We also believe that making nursing homes pay claims has the best and most realistic chance of holding them accountable.  It is only when nursing home owners truly conclude that it is in their best economic interest to provide adequate care that conditions will change. 
In 1975 a United States Senate Blue Ribbon Commission concluded after hearings in 25 cities that 1/2 of the nation’s nursing homes were providing scandalously substandard care with life threatening conditions.  Our experience representing victims of poor nursing home care and their families over the last 30 years has taught us that this has not changed.  The litany of abuse continues.

We understand that entrusting a loved one to a nursing home is a difficult decision at best.  We also understand the incredible sense of betrayal that we feel when our mothers or fathers or grandparents are neglected or abused.  We understand that when this happens people need to speak out and hold these facilities accountable.

Civil Rights

Since the firm opened its doors in 1979, significant civil rights cases have also been an important passion. Our civil and constitutional rights have been eroding in the last thirty years and we are therefore determined to represent people whose rights have been trampled, including persons victimized by racial and national origin discrimination, sexual harassment, age and disability discrimination, religious discrimination, and First Amendment violations. The rights of the state (including local governments) have increased at the expense of individual liberties and we are especially interested in advocating for individuals who have been grievously wronged by governmental misconduct and abuse of power.

This dedication to civil rights began with John’s earliest cases, including suing RTD to put lifts on buses so that people in wheelchairs could begin to have equal access to the state. We represented the disability civil rights movement in Colorado from its inception and are still involved. We have done many discrimination cases. One of our cases for an African-American man brutally discriminated against and harassed based on his race, Roy Smith, was the subject of a Barbara Walter’s 20/20 special, Roy Smith’s America. It was also the subject of a documentary film.

We have helped establish rights for victims of police misconduct and liability of co employees for outrageous sexual misconduct. We have won Orders from the Colorado Supreme Court establishing rights of a whistleblower, Dr. Carl Johnson, to be free from termination as the Health Director for Jefferson County for exposing the dangers facing the public from radiation at Rocky Flats. In that same case, we established the legal standard for disqualifying biased judges in civil cases.

Along with hundreds of other lawyers from across the country, we currently represent several detainees who have been indefinitely imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in habeas corpus proceedings against the United States Government. This work is pro bono. We recently published an article about our experiences in obtaining the release of an innocent young man from Mauritania. We actually traveled to Mauritania to meet with the Minister of Justice.

One of our current interests is in challenging the calloused and deliberate indifference of jails and prisons toward the known serious medical needs of people confined in such settings, resulting in serious medical injuries.

Please see our list of sampling of significant cases for examples of our work in both the long term care and civil rights areas.

Back to top