Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

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

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

Duty

Doctors and other medical professionals swear by their training and experience to treat patients and not cause further harm. Duty of care is the basis for the right of a patient to be compensated when they suffer injuries due to medical negligence. Your attorney can help you determine whether or not your doctor's actions violated this duty of care, and if the breach caused injuries or illness to you.

To prove a duty to care, your lawyer must to establish that a medical professional had an agreement with you and have a fiduciary obligation to perform their duties with reasonable competence and care. This relationship may be proven by eyewitness testimony of witnesses, doctor-patient records and expert testimony of doctors who have similar education, experience, and training.

Your lawyer will also have to prove that the medical professional violated their duty of care by failing to adhere to the accepted standards of their area of expertise. This is often described as negligence. Your lawyer will evaluate what the defendant did with what a reasonable individual would do in a similar situation.

Your lawyer must prove that the defendant's breach of duty directly led to the loss or injury you suffered. This is referred to as causation, and your attorney will rely on evidence like your medical records, witness statements and expert testimony to show that the defendant's failure to adhere to the standards of care in your case was the direct cause of your loss or injury.

Breach

A doctor is responsible for the duties of care that are consistent with professional medical standards. If a doctor fails to meet the standards, and the result is an injury that is medically negligent, negligence can occur. Typically the testimony of medical professionals with similar training, skills, certifications and experience will help determine what the standard of care should be in a particular circumstance. State and federal laws, as well as policies of the institute, help define what doctors are required to provide for specific types of patients.

In order to win a malpractice claim the case must be proved that the doctor breached his or her duty of care and that the breach was the direct cause of injury. This is referred to in legal terms as the causation element, and it is imperative to establish. If a physician has to perform an x-ray on an injured arm, they have to put the arm in a cast and properly set it. If the doctor is unable to perform this, and the patient suffers a permanent loss of the use of the arm, malpractice lawsuit may have taken place.

Causation

Legal malpractice claims based on evidence that the lawyer made mistakes that resulted in financial losses to the client. For instance the lawyer does not file a lawsuit within the statute of limitations, which results in the case being lost forever the person who was injured could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

However, it's important to realize that not all mistakes made by lawyers are a sign of illegal. Strategies and planning mistakes are not typically considered to be misconduct. Attorneys have a broad decision-making discretion to make decisions, as long as they're in the right place.

The law also allows lawyers considerable latitude to not perform discovery on behalf of their clients in the event that the failure was not unreasonable or negligent. Failure to uncover important documents or facts, such as witness statements or medical reports or medical reports, could be an instance of legal malpractice. Other examples of malpractice are the failure to include certain defendants or claims, for instance forgetting a survival count for an unjustly-dead case, or the repeated failure to communicate with clients.

It is also important to keep in mind the fact that the plaintiff needs to show that if it wasn't for the lawyer's negligent conduct they could have won their case. The claim of the plaintiff for malpractice will be rejected when it isn't proven. 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

A plaintiff must demonstrate that the attorney's actions resulted in actual financial losses to win a legal malpractice suit. This should be proved in a lawsuit using evidence like expert testimony, correspondence between the client and attorney or billing records, and other documentation. A plaintiff must also prove that a reasonable attorney could have prevented the harm caused by the negligence of the lawyer. This is called proximate causation.

Malpractice can occur in many different ways. Some of the most common types of malpractice include: failing to meet a deadline, for example, a statute of limitations, failing to conduct a check on conflicts or other due diligence on the case, not applying law to a client's circumstance and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. the commingling of funds from a trust account with the attorney's personal accounts or handling a case improperly and failing to communicate with the client are just a few examples of misconduct.

Medical malpractice lawsuits typically involve claims for compensatory damages. The compensations pay for out-of-pocket expenses as well as losses such as medical and hospitals bills, the cost of equipment to aid in recovery and lost wages. In addition, victims may seek non-economic damages, like pain and suffering as well as loss of enjoyment life and emotional distress.

Legal malpractice cases typically involve claims for compensatory as well as punitive damages. The first compensates the victim for the losses caused by the attorney's negligence and the latter is intended to deter future malpractice on the part of the defendant.