Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys have a fiduciary obligation with their clients and are expected to behave with diligence, care and expertise. Attorneys make mistakes, just like every other professional.

The mistakes made by attorneys are legal malpractice. To demonstrate legal malpractice, an aggrieved party must show that there was breach of duty, causation, breach and damage. Let's look at each of these elements.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors swear to apply their education and skills to cure patients and not to cause further harm. The legal right of a patient to compensation for injuries sustained from medical malpractice hinges on the notion of the duty of care. Your attorney will 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 legal relationship with you that have a fiduciary obligation to act with a reasonable level of skill and care. This can be demonstrated by eyewitness testimony, physician-patient reports and expert testimony from doctors with similar education, experience and training.

Your lawyer will also need to show that the medical professional breached their duty of care by not adhering to the accepted standards of their area of expertise. This is commonly called negligence. Your lawyer will evaluate what the defendant did to what a reasonable person would do in the same situation.

Your lawyer must also demonstrate that the defendant's negligence directly contributed to your loss or injury. This is known as causation. Your attorney will rely on evidence like your doctor-patient documents, witness statements and expert testimony to demonstrate that the defendant's failure to uphold the standard of care in your case was the direct cause of your injury or loss.

Breach

A doctor has a responsibility of care for his patients that conforms to the highest standards of medical practice. If a doctor does not meet those standards, and the resulting failure causes an injury or medical malpractice, then negligence could result. Typically, expert testimony from medical professionals with similar training, skills and experience, as well as certifications and certificates will aid in determining what the best standard of medical care should be in a particular circumstance. State and federal laws as well as institute policies also help determine what doctors should perform for specific types of patients.

To prevail in a malpractice lawsuit it must be established that the doctor did not fulfill his or her duty to care and that the breach was a direct reason for an injury. In legal terms, this is referred to as the causation component and it is essential to establish. If a doctor is required to obtain an xray of an injured arm, they have to put the arm in a cast and correctly place it. If the doctor fails to do this and the patient suffers a permanent loss in the use of their arm, then malpractice may have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims are based on evidence that shows the attorney's errors caused financial losses to the client. Legal malpractice claims may be brought by the party who suffered the loss if, for example, the lawyer fails to file the suit within the prescribed time and results in the case being lost forever.

It's important to recognize that not all mistakes made by attorneys constitute malpractice. Strategy and planning errors are not typically considered to be the definition of malpractice. Attorneys have a broad range of discretion in making decisions so long as they're reasonable.

The law also allows attorneys ample discretion to refrain from performing discovery on behalf of their clients as long as the error was not unreasonable or negligence. Legal malpractice can be caused by failing to discover important documents or facts, like medical reports or witness statements. Other instances of malpractice could be a failure to add certain defendants or claims such as omitting to make a survival claim in a case of wrongful death or the consistent and prolonged failure to contact the client.

It's also important to keep in mind that it must be proved that but for the lawyer's negligence, the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. If not, the plaintiff's claims for malpractice will be denied. This requirement makes it difficult to file a legal malpractice law firm claim. For malpractice lawsuit this reason, it's essential to choose 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 needs to be proven with evidence such as expert testimony and correspondence between the attorney and client. In addition, the plaintiff must prove that a reasonable lawyer would have avoided the damage caused by the negligence of the attorney. This is known as the proximate cause.

The act of malpractice can be triggered in a variety of different ways. The most frequent errors include: not meeting an expiration date or statute of limitations; not performing the necessary conflict checks on an instance; applying the law incorrectly to a client's circumstances; and breaching an obligation of fiduciary (i.e. Commingling funds from a trust account the attorney's personal accounts or handling a case in a wrong manner, and failing to communicate with the client are just a few examples of misconduct.

In most medical malpractice cases the plaintiff will seek compensation damages. They are awarded to the victim in exchange for out-of-pocket expenses and losses, for example hospital and medical bills, the cost of equipment that aids in healing, as well as lost wages. Victims can 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 claims for punitive and compensatory damages. The former is intended to compensate the victim for the damages caused by negligence on the part of the attorney and the latter is intended to discourage any future malpractice on the part of the defendant.