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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are required to fulfill a fiduciary responsibility to their clients and they must act with a high degree of skill, diligence and care. However, like all professionals attorneys make mistakes.

Some errors made by attorneys are a result of malpractice. To prove negligence in a legal sense the aggrieved party must prove the breach of duty, duty, causation, and damage. Let's take a look at each of these aspects.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors swear to use their training and experience to treat patients and not cause harm to others. The duty of care is the foundation for a patient's right to compensation in the event of injury due to medical malpractice. Your lawyer can help determine if your doctor's actions breached this duty of care, and whether these breaches resulted in injury or illness to you.

To prove a duty of care, your lawyer has to demonstrate that a medical professional had an agreement with you, in which they had a fiduciary obligation to perform their duties with reasonable expertise and care. Establishing that this relationship existed could require evidence like the records of your doctor and patient or eyewitness evidence, or expert testimony from doctors with similar qualifications, experience and education.

Your lawyer will also have to prove that the medical professional breached their duty of care by failing to adhere to the accepted standards of practice in their area of expertise. This is often called negligence. Your attorney will examine the defendant's actions to what a reasonable person would take in the same scenario.

Your lawyer will also need to prove that the breach of the defendant's duty directly contributed to your loss or injury. This is referred to as causation. Your lawyer will make use of evidence, such as your doctor/patient records, witness testimony, and expert testimony to prove that the defendant's inability to comply with the standard of care was the main cause of the injury or loss to you.

Breach

A doctor owes patients duties of care that are consistent with the highest standards of medical professionalism. If a physician fails to live up to those standards and this causes injury, then negligence and medical malpractice might occur. Typically, expert testimony from medical professionals with similar training, skills and experience, as well as certifications and certificates will help determine what the appropriate standard of treatment should be in a particular circumstance. Federal and state laws, along with institute policies, help determine what doctors are required to do for certain types of patients.

To be successful in a malpractice case it must be established that the doctor acted in violation of his or her duty of take care of patients and that the breach was the direct cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is known as the causation factor and it is vital that it is established. For example, if a broken arm requires an x-ray, the doctor has to properly set the arm and place it in a cast for proper healing. If the doctor fails to perform this, and the patient is left with a permanent loss of the use of their arm, malpractice lawyers could have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims are based on evidence that the attorney's mistakes resulted in financial losses for the client. For instance, if a lawyer fails to file a lawsuit within the statute of limitations, resulting in the case being lost for ever and the victim could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

However, it's important to realize that not all mistakes made by attorneys are illegal. Planning and strategy errors are not always considered to be negligence. Attorneys have a broad range of discretion to make decisions, as long as they're rational.

The law also grants attorneys ample discretion to refrain from performing discovery on behalf of clients in the event that the decision was not arbitrary or a case of negligence. The failure to discover crucial details or documents like medical reports or witness statements could be a sign of legal malpractice. Other examples of malpractice are the failure to add certain defendants or claims, for instance forgetting a survival count for a wrongful-death case or the recurrent failure to communicate with clients.

It's also important to note that it must be proven that if it weren't for the lawyer's negligence, the plaintiff would have won the case. In the event that it is not, the plaintiff's claim for malpractice will be rejected. This makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. It is essential to choose an experienced attorney.

Damages

To prevail in a legal malpractice lawsuit a plaintiff must demonstrate actual financial losses caused by the actions of the attorney. This must be shown in a lawsuit with evidence like expert testimony, correspondence between the client and attorney, billing records and other documents. In addition the plaintiff must show that a reasonable lawyer could have avoided the harm that was caused by the negligence of the attorney. This is called proximate causation.

Malpractice can occur in many different ways. The most frequent malpractices include: failing the deadline or statute of limitations; not performing an investigation into a conflict in an instance; applying the law improperly to a client's situation; or breaking the fiduciary duty (i.e. the commingling of funds from a trust account with an attorney's account or handling a case improperly and failing to communicate with the client are just a few examples of misconduct.

In most medical malpractice cases, the plaintiff will seek compensatory damages. These compensations are intended to compensate the victim for out-of pocket expenses and expenses such as hospital and medical bills, costs of equipment to aid recovery, and lost wages. Victims may also claim non-economic damages such as discomfort and pain or loss of enjoyment in their lives, and emotional anxiety.

In a lot of legal malpractice cases there are lawsuits for punitive as well as compensatory damages. The former compensates the victim for losses resulting from the attorney's negligence, while the latter is designed to deter any future malpractice committed by the defendant.