Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys have a fiduciary connection with their clients and are required to behave with diligence, care and skill. Attorneys make mistakes just like any other professional.

The mistakes made by an attorney are malpractice. To prove legal negligence, the aggrieved must show duty, breach of duty, causation and damages. Let's review each of these elements.

Duty-Free

Medical professionals and doctors swear an oath to apply their expertise and knowledge to cure patients, 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 can help you determine if your doctor's actions violated this duty of care, and whether the breach caused injury or illness to you.

To establish a duty of care, your lawyer has to prove that a medical professional had a legal relationship with you and owed you a fiduciary responsibility to perform their duties with an acceptable level of competence and care. Proving that this relationship existed may require evidence, such as the records of your doctor-patient or eyewitness evidence, or expert testimony from doctors with similar experiences, education and training.

Your lawyer must also prove that the medical professional breached their duty of care by not living up to the accepted standards of practice in their area of expertise. This is often called negligence, and your attorney will assess the conduct of the defendant with what a reasonable person would perform in the same situation.

Your lawyer must also show that the defendant's negligence directly caused your loss or injury. This is referred to as causation, and your lawyer will make use of evidence like your medical reports, witness statements and expert testimony to show that the defendant's failure to meet the standard of care in your case was a direct cause of your loss or injury.

Breach

A doctor is bound by a duty of treatment to his patients that reflects professional medical standards. If a physician fails to meet these standards, and the resulting failure causes an injury or medical malpractice, then negligence can occur. Typically the testimony of medical professionals who have similar training, expertise and certifications will help determine what the appropriate standard of medical care should be in a particular case. State and federal laws, as well as guidelines from the institute, help define 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 violated his or her duty of care and that the violation was a direct reason for an injury. This is referred to in legal terms as the causation component and it is essential that it be established. If a doctor has to conduct an x-ray examination of a broken arm, they must put the arm in a cast and then correctly set it. If the doctor fails to perform this, and the patient suffers a permanent loss in the use of the arm, Malpractice Attorney may have occurred.

Causation

Legal malpractice claims based on evidence that the lawyer made mistakes that resulted in financial losses for the client. For instance when a lawyer fails to file a lawsuit within the prescribed time of limitations, resulting in the case being lost forever the person who was injured could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

It is crucial to be aware that not all errors made by attorneys constitute mistakes that constitute malpractice. Strategies and planning errors do not usually constitute misconduct. Attorneys have a wide range of discretion in making decisions, as long as they're reasonable.

In addition, the law allows attorneys a wide range of options to refuse to conduct a discovery process on a client's behalf, as long as the action was not unreasonable or negligent. Legal malpractice can be committed through the failure to uncover important documents or information, such as medical reports or witness statements. Other examples of malpractice include a inability to include certain defendants or claims for example, like forgetting to file a survival count in a wrongful-death case, or the repeated and long-running inability to communicate with clients.

It is also important to remember the fact that the plaintiff needs to show that if it wasn't the lawyer's negligence they would have won their case. If not, the plaintiff's claims for malpractice will be rejected. This is why it's difficult to file a legal malpractice claim. It is important to employ an experienced attorney.

Damages

A plaintiff must show that the lawyer's actions led to actual financial losses in order to win a legal malpractice suit. In the case of a lawsuit this has to be proven through evidence, like expert testimony or correspondence between the client and attorney. In addition the plaintiff has to prove that a reasonable lawyer could have prevented the harm that was caused by the negligence of the attorney. This is called proximate causation.

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

In the majority of medical malpractice cases the plaintiff is seeking compensation damages. They compensate the victim for expenses out of pocket and losses, including hospital and medical bills, costs of equipment needed to aid in healing, as well as lost wages. In addition, victims may be able to claim non-economic damages like pain and suffering or loss of enjoyment life, and emotional stress.

Legal malpractice cases typically involve claims for compensatory as well as punitive damages. The former is intended to compensate the victim for the losses 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.