Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are required to fulfill a fiduciary responsibility to their clients and they are expected act with a high degree of skill, diligence and care. However, just like any other professional attorneys make mistakes.

Some errors made by attorneys are legal malpractice. To prove legal malpractice, an victim must prove duty, breach, causation and damages. Let's look at each of these components.

Duty

Doctors and other medical professionals swear to apply their education and experience to help patients and not to cause further harm. Duty of care is the foundation for the right of a patient to be compensated in the event of injury due to medical malpractice. Your attorney will determine if the actions of your doctor breached the duty of medical care and if the breach resulted in injury or illness.

To establish a duty of care, your lawyer must to show that a medical professional has an official relationship with you, in which they had a fiduciary obligation to act with a reasonable level of skill and care. To prove that the relationship existed, you may require evidence, such as the records of your doctor-patient or eyewitness evidence, or expert testimony from doctors with similar experience, education and training.

Your lawyer will also have to demonstrate that the medical professional breached their duty of caring by failing to follow the accepted standards in their field. This is often called negligence. Your attorney will examine the defendant's actions with what a reasonable person would take in the same scenario.

Then, your lawyer has to prove that the defendant's lapse of duty directly caused the loss or injury you suffered. This is referred to as causation. Your lawyer will make use of evidence such as your medical documents, witness statements and expert testimony to demonstrate that the defendant's inability to uphold the standard of care in your case was a direct cause of your injury or loss.

Breach

A doctor owes patients duties of care that are consistent with professional standards in medical practice. If a doctor fails to meet those standards and this results in injury, then medical malpractice or negligence could occur. Typically, expert testimony from medical professionals who have similar training, expertise and certifications will assist in determining what the minimum standard of medical care should be in a particular case. Federal and state laws, along with guidelines from the institute, help define what doctors are required to do for certain kinds of patients.

To prevail in a malpractice lawsuit, it must be proven that the doctor violated his or her duty of care and that the violation was a direct reason for an injury. In legal terms, this is known as the causation element and malpractice lawsuits it is crucial to establish. If a doctor is required to take an x-ray of an injured arm, they have to put the arm in a cast and properly set it. If the physician failed to complete the procedure and the patient was left with permanent loss of the use of the arm, then malpractice could have occurred.

Causation

Lawyer malpractice attorney claims are based on the evidence that the lawyer made mistakes that resulted in financial losses for the client. For instance, if a lawyer does not file an action within the timeframe of limitations, leading to the case being lost forever and the victim could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

It is important to understand that not all mistakes made by lawyers are a sign of malpractice. Mistakes in strategy and planning are not usually considered to be malpractice attorneys are given lots of freedom to make decisions based on their judgments as long as they're reasonable.

In addition, the law allows attorneys the right to conduct discovery on a client's behalf, as long as the action was not negligent or unreasonable. Inability to find important documents or facts like medical or witness statements, is a potential example of legal malpractice. Other examples of malpractice are the failure to include certain defendants or claims, such as not noticing a survival count in the case of wrongful death or the recurrent failure to communicate with clients.

It's also important to note that it must be proved that, if not the negligence of the lawyer, the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. The plaintiff's claim for malpractice will be dismissed if it's not proved. This requirement makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. This is why it's essential to choose an experienced attorney to represent you.

Damages

To win a legal malpractice suit, a plaintiff must demonstrate actual financial losses resulting from the actions of the attorney. In a lawsuit, this must be proved with evidence, like expert testimony or correspondence between the attorney and the client. In addition the plaintiff has to prove that a reasonable lawyer would have avoided the harm that was caused by the attorney's negligence. This is known as proximate causation.

The act of malpractice can be triggered in a variety of different ways. Some of the more common kinds of malpractice are: failing to meet a deadline, such as a statute of limitations, a failure to conduct a conflict check or other due diligence check on a case, improperly applying law to a client's situation and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. merging funds from a trust account with the attorney's own accounts as well as failing to communicate with the client are just a few examples of misconduct.

In the majority of medical malpractice cases the plaintiff will seek compensation damages. These compensations compensate the victim for out-of-pocket expenses as well as losses, such as medical and hospitals bills, costs of equipment to help recover and lost wages. In addition, victims can seek non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering as well as loss of enjoyment life and emotional suffering.

In a lot of legal malpractice cases, there are lawsuits for punitive as well as compensatory damages. The former is intended to compensate victims for losses caused by the negligence of the attorney and the latter is intended to prevent future mistakes by the defendant's side.