Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are bound by a fiduciary obligation to their clients, and they must act with a degree of diligence, skill and care. Attorneys make mistakes, as do other professional.

Some mistakes made by lawyers are considered to be malpractice. To prove legal malpractice, an victim must prove duty, breach, causation and damages. Let's look at each of these elements.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors take an oath to use their knowledge and expertise to treat 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 lawyer can help determine whether or not your doctor's actions breached this duty of care, and if those breaches caused injury or illness to you.

Your lawyer must demonstrate that the medical professional owed you the duty of a fiduciary to perform with reasonable skill and care. This relationship can be established by eyewitness testimony, physician-patient records, and expert testimony of doctors who have similar education, experience, and training.

Your lawyer must also prove that the medical professional breached their duty of care by not adhering to the standards of practice that are accepted in their field. This is often called negligence, and your attorney will compare the defendant's behavior to what a reasonable person would do in the same situation.

Your lawyer must also prove that the breach by the defendant led directly to your injury or loss. This is called causation. Your lawyer will rely on evidence like your medical or patient records, witness testimony and expert testimony to prove that the defendant's inability to meet the standards of care was the main cause of the injury or loss to you.

Breach

A doctor has a responsibility of treatment to his patients that conforms to the highest standards of medical practice. If a doctor fails to meet these standards, and the resulting failure causes an injury, then medical malpractice or negligence could occur. Expert testimony from medical professionals who have similar training, certificates and skills can help determine the level of care in a given situation. State and federal laws and institute policies can also be used to determine what doctors should perform for specific types of patients.

To be successful in a malpractice case it must be established that the doctor did not fulfill his or her duty to take care of patients and that the breach was the direct cause of an injury. This is referred to in legal terms as the causation element and it is imperative that it be established. For example, if a broken arm requires an x-ray the doctor must set the arm and then place it in a cast to ensure proper healing. If the doctor is unable to complete this task and the patient is left with a permanent loss of the use of their arm, malpractice may have taken place.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims are founded on the evidence that the 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, which results in the case being lost forever, the injured party could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

However, it's important to understand that not all errors made by lawyers are a sign of illegal. Errors involving strategy and planning aren't usually considered to be a violation of the law and lawyers have a lot of latitude in making judgment calls so long as they're reasonable.

The law also allows lawyers the right to refuse to conduct discovery on behalf of their clients in the event that the reason for the delay was not unreasonable or a case of negligence. Legal malpractice lawsuit can be caused through the failure to uncover important documents or lawyers facts, such as medical reports or witness statements. Other instances of malpractice could be a inability to include certain claims or defendants, such as forgetting to include a survival count in a case of wrongful death or the consistent and extended inability to contact a client.

It is also important to consider the necessity for the plaintiff to prove that if not the lawyer's negligence they would have prevailed. The claim of malpractice by the plaintiff will be dismissed when it isn't proven. This makes bringing legal malpractice claims difficult. It's crucial to hire an experienced attorney.

Damages

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

Malpractice occurs in many ways. The most frequent mistakes are: failing to meet a deadline or statute of limitations; not performing the necessary conflict checks on an instance; applying the law incorrectly to a client's circumstances; and breaching the fiduciary obligation (i.e. merging funds from a trust account with the attorney's own accounts, mishandling a case 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. The compensations pay for the cost of out-of-pocket expenses and losses, such as medical and hospitals bills, the cost of equipment to aid recovery, and lost wages. Victims may also claim non-economic damages such as discomfort and pain as well as loss of enjoyment from their lives, and emotional suffering.

In many legal malpractice cases, there are claims for punitive and compensatory damages. The former is intended to compensate the victim for the losses caused by the attorney's negligence while the latter is meant to deter future malpractice on the part of the defendant.