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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are in a fiduciary position with their clients and are required to act with diligence, care and ability. Attorneys make mistakes, just like any other professional.

A mistake made by an attorney can be considered legal malpractice. To demonstrate legal malpractice, an aggrieved party has to prove duty, breach, causation and damage. Let's look at each of these elements.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors swear to use their education and experience to treat patients and not to cause harm to others. A patient's legal right to compensation for injuries sustained from medical malpractice hinges on the notion of duty of care. Your attorney can determine if your doctor's actions violated the duty to care and if the breach resulted in injury or illness.

To establish a duty of care, your lawyer needs to show that a medical professional had an official relationship with you, in which they had a fiduciary obligation to act with an acceptable level of competence and care. Proving that this relationship existed could require evidence like your records of your doctor-patient relationship eyewitness accounts and expert testimony from doctors who have similar experience, education and training.

Your lawyer will also have to establish that the medical professional violated their duty to care by failing to adhere to the accepted standards in their field. This is often referred to as negligence. Your attorney will evaluate the defendant's conduct to what a reasonable person would perform in the same situation.

Your lawyer must also demonstrate that the defendant's negligence directly contributed to your injury or loss. This is known as causation. Your attorney will use evidence like your medical documents, witness statements and expert testimony to demonstrate that the defendant's inability to meet the standards of care in your case was a direct cause of your injury or loss.

Breach

A doctor has a duty of care for his patients that conforms to the highest standards of medical practice. If a doctor doesn't meet those standards, and the failure results in an injury, then medical malpractice or negligence could occur. Typically the testimony of medical professionals with similar training, skills and certifications will help determine what the standard of care is in a particular case. State and federal laws, along with policies of the institute, help define what doctors are expected to do for certain types of patients.

To prevail in a malpractice lawsuit it must be established that the doctor did not fulfill his or her duty of care and that this violation was the sole cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is called the causation component and it is crucial to establish. For instance an injured arm requires an x-ray, the doctor should properly set the arm and then place it in a cast to ensure proper healing. If the doctor failed to do this and the patient suffered an irreparable loss of function of that arm, then malpractice may have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims are based on evidence that the attorney's errors caused financial losses to the client. For example when a lawyer does not file an action within the timeframe of limitations, which results in the case being lost forever the person who was injured could bring legal malpractice law firm lawsuits.

It's important to recognize that not all errors made by attorneys are malpractice. Strategies and planning mistakes do not usually constitute malpractice. Attorneys have a wide decision-making discretion to make decisions, as long as they're rational.

The law also allows attorneys ample discretion to refrain from performing discovery for a client provided that the error was not unreasonable or negligence. Legal malpractice is committed by failing to discover important documents or evidence, such as medical reports or witness statements. Other examples of malpractice include a inability to include certain defendants or claims, such as forgetting to make a survival claim in a wrongful death case or the frequent and extended failure to contact a client.

It's also important to note that it must be established that if it weren't 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 denied. This requirement makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. It's important to find an experienced attorney to represent you.

Damages

A plaintiff must show that the attorney's actions caused actual financial losses in order to win a legal malpractice suit. In a lawsuit, this has to be proven through evidence, like expert testimony or correspondence between the attorney and the client. A plaintiff must also prove that a reasonable attorney could have prevented the harm caused by the negligence of the lawyer. This is referred to as proximate causation.

It can happen in many different ways. Some of the most common errors include: not meeting an expiration date or statute of limitations; failing to perform the necessary conflict checks on an issue; applying the law incorrectly to a client's circumstances; and breaching the fiduciary obligation (i.e. the commingling of trust account funds with an attorney's personal accounts), mishandling of a case, and failing to communicate with the client.

Medical malpractice lawsuits typically involve claims for compensatory damages. The compensations pay for out-of pocket expenses and losses such as hospital and medical bills, equipment costs to help recover and lost wages. In addition, victims can seek non-economic damages, like suffering and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life and emotional suffering.

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