If someone has a HIPAA violation (e.g., a small town psychologist shares a patient's information, or a psychiatrist has one too many drinks at a bar and violates someone's privacy), why would he sue?
Won't everything in the legal matter become public? Anyone could just view the pleadings? With Justia, it would be easy to search for someone's case and view the entire pleadings word-by-word from anywhere in the world. So to garner sympathy from the jury, all the private data and all of its consequences would need to come out. But this just ruins the victim's life further. In trying to get recourse, the situation is now one-thousand times worse.
It seems like a law suit where all documents submitted to the courts are public record would always worsen the privacy loss. Would you agree suing for privacy violation is self-defeating?

