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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are bound by a fiduciary obligation to their clients, and they are expected act with diligence, skill and care. Attorneys make mistakes just like any other professional.

There are many mistakes made by lawyers are malpractice. To establish legal malpractice lawyer, the aggrieved party must show the breach of duty, duty, causation and damage. Let's take a look at each of these elements.

Duty

Doctors and medical professionals take an oath to use their expertise and knowledge to treat patients, not causing further harm. Duty of care is the basis for the right of a patient to be compensated when they suffer injuries due to medical malpractice. Your attorney can determine if your doctor's actions breached the duty of care and whether these violations resulted in injury or illness.

To prove a duty to care, your lawyer will need to prove that a medical professional has an agreement with you and have a fiduciary obligation to act with reasonable expertise and care. Proving that this relationship existed could require evidence like the records of your doctor-patient eyewitness accounts and experts from doctors with similar knowledge, experience, and education.

Your lawyer must also demonstrate that the medical professional breached their duty of care by not adhering to the accepted standards of practice in their field. This is usually referred to by the term negligence. Your lawyer will evaluate the actions of the defendant to what a reasonable person would do in the same situation.

Finally, your lawyer must prove that the defendant's lapse of duty directly led to damage or loss to you. This is called causation. Your lawyer will make use of evidence like your doctor or patient documents, witness testimony and expert testimony, to prove that the defendant's failure meet the standard of care was the sole cause of the injury or loss to you.

Breach

A doctor has a duty of treatment to his patients that is in line with professional medical standards. If a physician fails to adhere to these standards and that failure causes injury, then medical malpractice and negligence may occur. Expert testimony from medical professionals who have similar training, certificates or experience can help determine the appropriate level of care in a given situation. State and federal laws and institute policies also help determine what doctors should do for specific types of patients.

To win a malpractice case it must be proven that the doctor breached his or duty of care and that this breach was a direct cause of injury. In legal terms, this is known as the causation component, and it is vital that it is established. For example when a broken arm requires an xray the doctor has to properly place the arm and put it in a cast to ensure proper healing. If the doctor fails to do this and the patient is left with a permanent loss of the use of the arm, malpractice could be at play.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims rely on evidence that the attorney's mistakes resulted in financial losses for the client. For example the lawyer does not file a lawsuit within the statute of limitations, which results in the case being lost for ever the party who suffered damages could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

It is important to recognize that not all errors made by lawyers constitute mistakes that constitute malpractice. Planning and strategy errors are not always considered to be the definition of malpractice. Attorneys have a broad range of discretion in making decisions, as long as they're able to make them in a reasonable manner.

The law also gives attorneys considerable latitude to not perform discovery on behalf of a client, so long as the failure was not unreasonable or a case of negligence. Legal malpractice can be committed through the failure to uncover important documents or facts, like medical reports or witness statements. Other instances of malpractice could be a inability to include certain claims or defendants, such as forgetting to make a survival claim in a wrongful death case or the frequent and prolonged failure to contact the client.

It's also important to note that it has to be proven that but for the lawyer's negligence, the plaintiff would have won the case. Otherwise, the plaintiff's claim for malpractice will be denied. This makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. Therefore, it's important to find an experienced attorney to represent you.

Damages

In order to prevail in a legal malpractice lawsuit, plaintiffs must show financial losses caused by the actions of the attorney. In a lawsuit, this has to be proven through evidence, such as expert testimony and correspondence between the client and attorney. The plaintiff must also show that a reasonable attorney would have prevented the damage caused by the lawyer's negligence. This is called proximate causation.

Malpractice can occur in many different ways. Some of the most common kinds of malpractice are: failing to meet a deadline, including the statute of limitation, failure to conduct a conflict-check or other due diligence check on a case, improperly applying law to a client's situation and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. the commingling of trust account funds with attorney's personal accounts) or mishandling a case, and failing to communicate with clients.

In the majority of medical malpractice cases the plaintiff will seek compensatory damages. They are awarded to the victim in exchange for the expenses out of pocket and losses, including hospital and medical bills, the cost of equipment needed to aid in healing, as well as lost wages. Victims may also claim non-economic damages, such as pain and discomfort and loss of enjoyment their lives, and emotional stress.

In many legal malpractice cases there are cases for punitive and compensatory damages. The former compensates the victim for the losses caused by the negligence of the attorney while the latter is meant to deter future malpractice on the defendant's part.