The $12.2 Million Question: What the Lakeview Verdict Means for You
TL;DR:
Ninety minutes - that's how long a Cook County jury needed to decide that Infinity Healthcare Management and its Lakeview facility owe the Adams family $12.2 million after grandma went from "early-stage dementia but physically healthy" to "bedridden with pressure wounds" in three months flat, then spent her final 16 months getting treated in surgery after surgery before dying. The state fined Lakeview $27,200 last July; the jury said try $12.2 million. We weren't in that courtroom and juries love a dead grandmother, but here's what we know for sure: plaintiffs' attorneys just proved you can pierce the LLC and hit the management company, and if you're running a portfolio of 1-star facilities in Cook County with a rap sheet longer than your census, you're not operating a nursing home - you're operating a lawsuit incubator.
A Shmooze Deep Dive
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Last Friday, a Cook County jury took ninety minutes to decide that Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center and its management company, Infinity Healthcare Management of Illinois, owed the family of Shirley Adams $12.2 million.
Ninety minutes. That's less time than most of your morning shiurim take.
According to the plaintiffs' attorneys at Levin & Perconti, it's the largest nursing home verdict in Illinois history.
A note before we dive in: We weren't in that courtroom. We don't have the trial transcripts, the defense's arguments, or Infinity's side of the story. What follows is based on public records, news coverage, and the plaintiffs' attorneys' statements. Juries get things wrong sometimes. They also get things right. We're not here to relitigate - we're here to understand what this case tells us about the current environment.
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THE CASE
Here's what's publicly known:
Shirley Adams, 79, was admitted to Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in June 2021. The facility sits at 735 West Diversey in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood - a North Side location, not some forgotten South Side building.
According to her family's lawsuit, Adams had early-stage dementia but was in good physical health when she arrived. According to the same lawsuit, within three months she had developed pressure wounds and declined to the point of being wheelchair-bound, then bedridden.
The family moved her to another facility in November 2021. She underwent more than 20 surgical procedures over the following 16 months before dying in February 2023.
The family alleged understaffing and poor oversight. The jury agreed, at least enough to return a $12.2 million verdict against both the facility LLC and the management company.
That's the case. Now let's talk about context.
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WHO IS INFINITY HEALTHCARE MANAGEMENT?
If you've been in this industry for more than five minutes, you've probably heard the name. If you haven't, here's your primer.
Infinity Healthcare Management operates out of Hillside, Illinois. The company is led by CEO Michael Blisko and Manager Moishe Gubin, partners who bought their first SNF together back in 2003. They celebrated 20 years in October 2023.
The scale is significant. Infinity manages approximately 85 facilities across Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. That's a lot of beds. That's a lot of exposure.
Gubin is also the CEO and Chairman of Strawberry Fields REIT (NYSE: STRW), a publicly traded real estate investment trust that owns 130 healthcare facilities with about 14,540 beds across 11 states. Blisko serves on that board too.
The structure works like this: Individual facilities operate as separate LLCs. Those LLCs pay rent to real estate holding companies (often Strawberry Fields subsidiaries). They also pay management fees to Infinity's consulting arm. It's a common arrangement in the industry - not unique to Infinity - designed to separate operations from real estate and provide various legal and tax benefits.
Critics call it "profit tunneling." Defenders call it standard REIT structure. A 2024 study from UCLA and Lehigh researchers using Illinois cost report data found that related-party real estate and management transactions accounted for 63% of industry profits statewide - profits that appear as "costs" on individual facility books.
Whether that's scandalous or just smart business depends on your perspective. What's harder to argue with is this: when the facility LLC has few assets on its books, there's less for plaintiffs to recover in a lawsuit. The money has already flowed upstream.
Which makes it notable that the Adams family sued - and won against - both the facility LLC and Infinity Healthcare Management itself.
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THE TRACK RECORD
Here's where we have to be careful. Public penalty records exist. They're maintained by CMS, state regulators, and aggregated by organizations like Good Jobs First. But penalties don't tell the whole story. Sometimes facilities get cited for technical violations. Sometimes they fight citations and win. Sometimes the worst operators skate while decent ones get hammered on paperwork.
That said, here's what the public record shows:
Good Jobs First's Violation Tracker lists Infinity Healthcare Management with $15.8 million in total penalties across 302 enforcement actions since 2000. The organization ranked Infinity 4th nationally for total violation cases since 2018, with 238 cases. Their 2023 report calculated Infinity's average penalty per facility at $218,269 - about three times the national average of roughly $29,000. Ouch.
Lakeview specifically has a 1-star CMS rating for health inspections, 1-star for staffing, and 2-star for quality measures. Federal records show nine fines totaling $175,240 over the past three years, plus one Medicare payment denial.
We could list more. But you get the picture. This is not a company that was going to get the benefit of the doubt from a Cook County jury.
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THE OWNERS
Moishe Gubin
Michael Blisko
These are not fly-by-night operators. They've been in this business for two decades. Blisko literally served on the state regulatory committee. They know the rules.
Fun fact from a court deposition: Infinity's consulting arm was originally called "New York Boys Management." They changed it because, as Blisko testified, it caused "image trauma" and "wasn't giving the professional identity" they wanted. What was the hava amina chevre?
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WHAT THIS VERDICT MEANS
Let's be clear about what $12.2 million represents.
The significance for operators:
Management companies are in the crosshairs. The plaintiffs didn't just sue the facility LLC - they sued Infinity Healthcare Management and won. That's the upstream entity. That's where the money is. Expect more plaintiffs' attorneys to follow this playbook.
Track records matter in court. We don't know exactly what evidence the jury saw. But when a facility has a 1-star rating, a history of fines, and a management company with a documented enforcement record, that's context fair or not that will sway regular people.
$50K fines vs. $12.2M verdicts. This is the math that matters. You can absorb regulatory penalties as a cost of operation. You cannot absorb many verdicts like this one. The Adams family's attorneys will get their contingency cut, but the message to other families is clear: litigation pays better than complaining to IDPH.
Illinois is Illinois. Cook County has always been plaintiff-friendly territory. This verdict doesn't change the fundamental legal landscape - it confirms it. If you're operating in Illinois, especially Chicago, you already knew this. If you didn't, now you do.
We don't know if Infinity plans to appeal. $12.2 million is significant but not necessarily company-threatening for an operation of their scale. They might fight this for years.
We don't know how much insurance will cover versus what comes out of pocket.
And we don't know - because we can't know - whether Shirley Adams' decline was actually the result of negligent care, or whether it was the tragic but natural progression of a 79-year-old woman with dementia whose body was failing. Families often struggle to accept decline. Sometimes they're right that the facility failed. Sometimes they're looking for someone to blame.
The industry has a lawsuit problem that's actually a staffing problem that's actually a reimbursement problem that's actually a political problem.
Illinois Medicaid rates are calculated using 2017 cost data. It's 2025. You do the math on what eight years of inflation does to margins.
Operators respond to tight margins by cutting where they can. Staffing is the biggest expense. So staffing gets cut. Facilities end up understaffed. Bad things happen to residents. Families sue. Juries award millions.
The plaintiffs' attorneys at Levin & Perconti have recovered over $1 billion for clients over the years. They're very good at what they do. When they see a facility with 1-star ratings and a management company with a documented track record, they see opportunity.
This isn't a moral judgment on the attorneys - they're doing their job, which is to get compensation for families who believe they were wronged. It's not even necessarily a moral judgment on Infinity - we don't know what happened in that building.
But it is a reality check for everyone in this industry:
The system is set up to squeeze you from every direction. Medicaid pays poverty rates. Staffing costs keep rising. Regulators cite you for violations. Trial attorneys sue you for negligence. And when something goes wrong - even if it would have gone wrong anyway - you're the one writing the check.
Some operators respond by cutting corners. Some respond by exiting the market. Some respond by building fortress-like compliance operations that still can't prevent every bad outcome because healthcare involves sick people who sometimes get sicker.
We're not here to tell you which path is right. We're here to tell you what the environment looks like.
And right now, in Illinois, it looks like this: a 90-minute jury deliberation, a $12.2 million verdict, and a management company that just became Exhibit A in every plaintiff's attorney's "who to sue" presentation for the next decade.
