Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are bound by a fiduciary obligation to their clients and they must behave with skill, diligence and care. But, as with all professionals attorneys make mistakes.

The mistakes made by an attorney can be considered malpractice. To establish legal malpractice, the victim must prove obligation, breach, causation and damage. Let's examine each of these aspects.

Duty

Doctors and medical professionals take the oath of using their skills and experience to treat patients, and not cause additional harm. Duty of care is the basis for the right of a patient to be compensated for injuries caused by medical negligence. Your attorney can determine if the actions of your doctor violated the duty of care and if those breaches caused injury or illness.

To prove a duty of care, your lawyer will need to prove that a medical professional has an official relationship with you and were bound by a fiduciary duty to perform their duties with an acceptable level of expertise and care. This relationship can be established by eyewitness testimony, malpractice lawsuits physician-patient reports and expert testimony from doctors with similar education, experience and training.

Your lawyer will also have to show that the medical professional violated their duty to care by failing to adhere to the accepted standards of their field. This is often called negligence. Your lawyer will assess the conduct of the defendant to what a reasonable person would take in the same scenario.

Finally, your lawyer must prove that the defendant's breach of duty directly resulted in your loss or injury. This is referred to as causation. Your lawyer will make use of evidence, such as your doctor/patient reports, witness testimony and expert testimony, to show that the defendant's inability to comply with the standard of care was the direct cause of injury or loss to you.

Breach

A doctor has a duty to patients of care that adhere to professional standards in medical practice. If a doctor fails to meet these standards and fails to do so causes injury, then medical malpractice or negligence could occur. Typically expert testimony from medical professionals with similar training, skills or certifications will help determine what the appropriate standard of care should be in a particular case. Federal and state laws, along with institute policies, determine what doctors are required to provide for specific types of patients.

In order to win a malpractice claim it must be established that the doctor acted in violation of his or her duty of care and that the violation was the direct cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is called the causation component and it is essential that it is established. If a doctor needs to conduct an x-ray examination of an injured arm, they must place the arm in a cast and properly set it. If the doctor was unable to do so and the patient was left with an unavoidable loss of function of that arm, then malpractice could have occurred.

Causation

Legal malpractice claims are based on the evidence that the attorney committed mistakes that led to financial losses to the client. For example when a lawyer fails to file a lawsuit within the prescribed time of limitations, which results in the case being lost for ever and the victim could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

It is important to understand that not all mistakes by attorneys are malpractice. Errors involving strategy and planning do not typically constitute malpractice and lawyers have a lot of latitude to make decisions based on their judgments as long as they're reasonable.

The law also allows lawyers ample discretion to refrain from performing discovery on behalf of their clients provided that the failure was not unreasonable or negligent. Legal malpractice is committed when a lawyer fails to find important documents or evidence, such as medical reports or witness statements. Other instances of malpractice include the failure to add certain defendants or claims, like forgetting a survival count for wrongful death cases, or the repeated failure to communicate with clients.

It is also important to note the fact that the plaintiff must prove that if not for the lawyer's careless conduct they would have won their case. The claim of the plaintiff for malpractice is deemed invalid if it's not proved. This requirement makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. It's crucial to hire an experienced attorney.

Damages

A plaintiff must demonstrate that the attorney's actions resulted in actual financial losses to prevail in a legal malpractice lawsuit. This can be proven in a lawsuit with evidence such as expert testimony, correspondence between the client and attorney along with billing records and other documentation. In addition, the plaintiff must prove that a reasonable lawyer would have prevented the damage caused by the attorney's negligence. This is referred to as proximate causation.

Malpractice occurs in many ways. Some of the more common kinds of malpractice are the failure to adhere to a deadline, which includes the statute of limitations, a failure to conduct a conflict-check or other due diligence on a case, improperly applying the law to the client's situation or breaking a fiduciary duty (i.e. the commingling of trust account funds with attorney's personal accounts) and Malpractice Lawsuits mishandling a case, and not communicating with the client.

In the majority of medical malpractice cases the plaintiff seeks compensation damages. The compensations pay for out-of-pocket expenses as well as expenses such as medical and hospitals bills, the cost of equipment to aid in recovery and lost wages. Victims are also able to claim non-economic damages like pain and discomfort as well as loss of enjoyment from their lives, and emotional suffering.

Legal malpractice cases usually involve claims for compensatory as well as punitive damages. The former compensates the victim for the losses caused by the negligence of the attorney, while the latter is designed to discourage future misconduct by the defendant.