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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys have a fiduciary obligation with their clients and are required to act with care, diligence and competence. However, like all professionals, attorneys make mistakes.

Some mistakes made by lawyers are legal malpractice. To prove negligence in a legal sense the victim must demonstrate the breach of duty, obligation, causation, and damages. Let's look at each of these components.

Duty-Free

Doctors and other medical professionals swear to apply their education and expertise to treat patients and not to cause harm to others. Duty of care is the basis for the right of a patient to be compensated when they suffer injuries due to medical malpractice. Your attorney can assist you determine whether or not your doctor's actions violated this duty of care, and if these breaches resulted in injury or illness to you.

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

Your lawyer will also have to prove that the medical professional breached their duty of caring by not adhering to the accepted standards in their field. This is often called negligence. Your lawyer will evaluate the defendant's conduct to what a reasonable person would do in the same situation.

Your lawyer must also demonstrate that the breach by the defendant directly caused your loss or injury. This is called causation. Your lawyer will rely on evidence like your doctor or patient records, witness testimony and expert testimony, to show that the defendant's failure to meet the standards of care was the sole 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 does not adhere to these standards and this causes injury, then negligence and medical malpractice might occur. Expert testimony from medical professionals who possess similar qualifications, training, skills and experience can help determine the appropriate level of care in any given situation. State and Malpractice lawsuits federal laws, along with institute policies, determine what doctors are required to provide for specific types of patients.

To win a malpractice case it is necessary to prove that the doctor breached his or duty of care and that the breach was a direct cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is known as the causation component and it is essential that it is established. If a physician has to take an x-ray of an injured arm, they must place the arm in a casting and correctly set it. If the doctor fails to do this and the patient loses their usage of the arm, then malpractice may be at play.

Causation

Lawyer malpractice claims are based on evidence that the lawyer made mistakes that resulted in financial losses to the client. For instance the lawyer fails to file an action within the timeframe of limitations, which results in the case being lost for ever and the victim could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

However, it's important to realize that not all mistakes made by lawyers constitute malpractice. Errors involving strategy and planning do not typically constitute malpractice attorneys are given lots of freedom to make judgment calls as long as they're reasonable.

The law also grants attorneys an enormous amount of discretion to not conduct discovery on behalf of their clients provided that the error was not unreasonable or negligent. The failure to discover crucial information or documents like medical reports or witness statements, is a potential example of legal malpractice. Other examples of malpractice are the failure to include certain defendants or claims, for instance the mistake of not remembering a survival number for wrongful death cases or the recurrent failure to communicate with clients.

It is also important to remember the fact that the plaintiff needs to prove that if not for the lawyer's careless conduct they would have won their case. The claim of malpractice by the plaintiff will be rejected 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 prevail in a legal malpractice lawsuit, the plaintiff must show actual financial losses incurred by the actions of an attorney. This must be shown in a lawsuit through evidence like expert testimony, correspondence between client and attorney, billing records and other documentation. A plaintiff must also demonstrate that a reasonable attorney would have prevented the harm caused by the negligence of the lawyer. This is referred to as proximate cause.

It can happen in a variety of ways. Some of the more common kinds of malpractice are: failing to meet a deadline, for example, a statute of limitations, a failure to conduct a conflict-check or other due diligence of a case, improperly applying the law to a client's case and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. the commingling of funds from a trust account with the attorney's personal 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 is seeking compensation damages. These compensations are intended to compensate the victim for the cost of out-of-pocket expenses and expenses such as medical and hospitals bills, costs of equipment to aid in recovery, and lost wages. In addition, victims can claim non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life and emotional distress.

Legal malpractice cases often involve claims for compensatory or punitive damages. The first is meant to compensate the victim for the damages caused by negligence on the part of the attorney while the latter is intended to discourage future malpractice on the part of the defendant.