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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys hold a fiduciary relationship with their clients and are required to behave with diligence, care and skill. However, just like any other professional attorneys make mistakes.

Not every mistake made by an attorney can be considered negligence. To prove negligence in a legal sense, the aggrieved must show obligation, breach of obligation, causation, and damages. Let's examine each of these aspects.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors swear an oath to apply their knowledge and expertise to cure patients, not to cause further harm. The legal right of a patient to be compensated for injuries sustained from medical malpractice is based on the notion of the duty of care. Your attorney can determine if your doctor's actions violated the duty of care and whether these violations caused you injury or illness.

Your lawyer must establish that the medical professional you hired owed the fiduciary obligation to act with reasonable skill and care. This can be demonstrated by eyewitness testimony, physician-patient records, and expert testimony of doctors with similar education, experience, and training.

Your lawyer will also need to establish that the medical professional breached their duty of caring by failing to follow the accepted standards in their field. This is usually known as negligence. Your attorney will compare what the defendant did to what a reasonable individual would do in the same situation.

Your lawyer must prove that the defendant's lapse of duty directly led to injury or loss to you. This is known as causation. Your attorney will rely on evidence like your medical documents, witness statements and expert testimony to prove that the defendant's inability to live up to the standard of care in your case was the direct cause of your injury or loss.

Breach

A doctor is bound by a duty of treatment to his patients that reflects professional medical standards. If a doctor fails to meet these standards and the failure causes injury, then medical malpractice law firm and negligence could occur. Typically expert testimony from medical professionals who have the same training, qualifications or certifications will help determine what the standard of treatment should be in a specific situation. Federal and state laws and institute policies also determine what doctors are required to do for specific types of patients.

To be successful in a malpractice case it must be established that the doctor violated his or her duty of care and that the breach was the primary cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is known as the causation component, and it is essential to establish. For instance in the event that a damaged arm requires an xray the doctor must set the arm and then place it in a cast to ensure proper healing. If the doctor was unable to do this and the patient suffered an unavoidable loss of the use of the arm, then malpractice could have occurred.

Causation

Legal malpractice claims based on the evidence that the lawyer made errors that resulted in financial losses for the client. For instance the lawyer fails to file a lawsuit within the statute of limitations, leading to the case being lost for ever, the injured party could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

It is important to realize that not all mistakes made by lawyers are a sign of illegal. Strategies and mistakes are not generally considered to be malpractice attorneys have the ability to make judgement calls so long as they're reasonable.

The law also gives attorneys the right to refuse to conduct discovery on behalf of clients as long as the error was not unreasonable or negligence. Legal malpractice is committed by not obtaining crucial documents or facts, such as medical reports or witness statements. Other instances of malpractice include inability to include certain defendants or claims, such as forgetting to submit a survival count in a wrongful death lawsuit, or the repeated and long-running inability to contact a client.

It's also important that it must be proved that if it weren't the negligence of the lawyer, the plaintiff would have won the case. Otherwise, the plaintiff's claim for malpractice will be denied. This requirement makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. This is why it's important to choose a seasoned attorney to represent you.

Damages

To win a legal malpractice case, plaintiffs must show financial losses incurred by the actions of an attorney. This must be shown in a lawsuit through evidence such as expert testimony, correspondence between the client and attorney along with billing records and other documents. A plaintiff must also prove that a reasonable attorney would have prevented the harm caused by the negligence of the lawyer. This is known as the proximate cause.

Malpractice can occur in many different ways. Some of the most common types of malpractice include: failing to adhere to a deadline, which includes the statute of limitations, a failure to conduct a conflict-check or other due diligence check on the case, not applying the law to a client's case or breaching a fiduciary obligation (i.e. the commingling of trust account funds with an attorney's personal accounts) and mishandling a case, and failing to communicate with clients.

In most medical malpractice cases the plaintiff seeks compensatory damages. They compensate the victim for the out-of-pocket expenses and losses, including medical and hospital bills, costs of equipment that aids in recovery, and loss of wages. In addition, victims may seek non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life and emotional suffering.

In a lot of legal malpractice cases there are cases for punitive and compensatory damages. The former is intended to compensate the victim for the damages due to the negligence of the attorney while the latter is designed to deter future malpractice by the defendant's side.