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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are in a fiduciary position with their clients and are expected to act with diligence, care and competence. But, as with all professionals, attorneys make mistakes.

A mistake made by an attorney is malpractice. To prove legal negligence the victim must demonstrate the breach of duty, obligation, causation, as well as damage. Let's look at each of these elements.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors swear to apply their education and experience to help patients and not to cause harm to others. A patient's legal right to receive compensation for injuries resulting due to medical malpractice is based on the concept of duty of care. Your attorney can determine if your doctor's actions breached the duty of care and if these breaches resulted in injury or illness.

To prove a duty to care, your lawyer needs to demonstrate that a medical professional had an official relationship with you, in which they were bound by a fiduciary duty to perform their duties with an acceptable level of expertise and care. This can be proved by eyewitness testimony of witnesses, doctor-patient documents and expert testimony from doctors with similar education, experience and training.

Your lawyer must also show that the medical professional breached their duty of care by not living up to the accepted standards of practice in their field. This is often referred to as negligence. Your attorney will assess the conduct of the defendant to what a reasonable individual would take in the same scenario.

Then, your lawyer has to demonstrate that the defendant's breach of duty directly led to your loss or injury. This is referred to as causation. Your lawyer will make use of evidence like your doctor or patient records, 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 is obligated to patients to perform duties of care that are consistent with professional standards in medical practice. If a physician fails to meet those standards, and the result is an injury that is medically negligent, negligence can occur. Typically, expert testimony from medical professionals who have the same training, qualifications and certifications will aid in determining what the best standard of medical care should be in a particular case. State and federal laws, as well as institute policies, define what doctors are expected to provide for specific types of patients.

To prevail in a malpractice lawsuit it is necessary to prove that the doctor breached his or her duty of care and that the breach was a direct cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is called the causation component, and it is crucial that it is established. If a physician has to perform an x-ray on a broken arm, they have to put the arm in a casting and correctly place it. If the doctor fails to do this and the patient is left with a permanent loss of the use of the arm, then malpractice may have taken place.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims are founded on the evidence that a lawyer made mistakes that led to financial losses to the client. For example, if a lawyer does not file an action within the timeframe of limitations, leading to the case being lost for ever, the injured party could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

However, it's important to recognize that not all mistakes made by attorneys are illegal. Strategy and planning errors do not usually constitute misconduct. Attorneys have a broad decision-making discretion to make decisions so long as they're in the right place.

The law also allows attorneys considerable latitude to not perform discovery on behalf of their clients provided that the failure was not unreasonable or a result of negligence. Failing to discover important details or documents, such as medical reports or witness statements could be a sign of legal malpractice lawyer. Other examples of malpractice are the inability to add certain defendants or claims, such as forgetting a survival count for the case of wrongful death, or the repeated failure to communicate with clients.

It is also important to remember that it must be proved that if it weren't the lawyer's negligence, the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. In the event that it is not, the plaintiff's claim for malpractice will be rejected. This requirement 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 case, a plaintiff must demonstrate actual financial losses that result from the actions of an attorney. This has to be demonstrated in a lawsuit with evidence such as expert testimony, correspondence between the client and attorney or billing records, and other documents. In addition the plaintiff must show that a reasonable lawyer could have avoided the harm caused by the attorney's negligence. This is referred to as the proximate cause.

It can happen in many different ways. Some of the most common kinds of malpractice are the failure to meet a deadline, for example, a statute of limitations, failure to conduct a check on conflicts or other due diligence on the case, not applying the law to the client's situation and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. mixing funds from a trust account with the attorney's own accounts as well as failing to communicate with the client are just a few examples of misconduct.

In the majority of medical malpractice cases the plaintiff seeks compensation damages. They are awarded to the victim in exchange for expenses out of pocket and losses, like medical and hospital bills, the cost of equipment required to aid in recovery, and loss of wages. Victims can also seek non-economic damages such as pain and discomfort or loss of enjoyment in their lives, as well as emotional distress.

In many legal malpractice cases, there are cases for punitive and compensatory damages. The former compensates the victim for losses caused by the negligence of the attorney, while the latter is designed to discourage future malpractice by the defendant.