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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are required to fulfill a fiduciary responsibility to their clients, and they are expected act with skill, diligence and care. Attorneys make mistakes, as do other professional.

Every mistake made by an attorney can be considered malpractice. To prove legal malpractice, an aggrieved person must demonstrate duty, breach, causation and damages. Let's look at each of these aspects.

Duty-Free

Medical professionals and doctors swear by their training and skills to cure patients and not to cause harm to others. The legal right of a patient to receive compensation for injuries resulting from medical malpractice hinges on the concept of duty of care. Your attorney will determine if the actions of your doctor violated the duty to care and whether these violations caused you injury or illness.

To prove a duty to care, your lawyer has to show that a medical professional has an legal relationship with you and have a fiduciary obligation to act with an acceptable level of skill and care. This relationship can be established through eyewitness testimony, doctor-patient documents and expert testimony from doctors with similar education, experience and training.

Your lawyer will also have to prove that the medical professional breached their duty of caring in not adhering to the accepted standards of their area of expertise. This is often referred to as negligence, and your attorney will examine the defendant's actions to what a reasonable individual would do in the same circumstance.

In addition, your lawyer must demonstrate that the defendant's breach of duty directly caused your loss or injury. This is referred to as causation, and your lawyer will make use of evidence such as your medical reports, witness statements and expert testimony to demonstrate that the defendant's failure to adhere to the standards of care in your case was the direct cause of your injury or loss.

Breach

A doctor is required to perform a duty of care for his patients that reflects professional medical standards. If a physician fails to meet these standards and the failure causes injury, then negligence and medical malpractice might occur. Typically, expert testimony from medical professionals who have the same training, qualifications and certifications will assist in determining what the minimum standard of care should be in a particular situation. Federal and state laws, along with institute policies, help define what doctors are required to do for certain types of patients.

To win a malpractice case the case must be proved that the doctor violated his or their duty of care, and that this breach was the direct cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is called the causation element and it is crucial to establish. If a doctor has to conduct an x-ray examination of a broken arm, they must put the arm in a cast and properly place it. If the doctor was unable to do this and the patient was left with an irreparable loss of the use of the arm, then malpractice could have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims are based on the evidence that proves that the lawyer's mistakes caused financial losses to the client. For instance when a lawyer does not file a lawsuit within the statute of limitations, leading to the case being lost forever, the injured party can bring legal malpractice actions.

It is important to realize that not all mistakes made by lawyers are a sign of malpractice. Strategies and mistakes do not typically constitute malpractice and lawyers have lots of freedom to make judgement calls so long as they are reasonable.

The law also allows attorneys an enormous amount of discretion to not conduct discovery for a client as long as the decision was not arbitrary or negligence. Failing to discover important documents or facts, such as medical or witness statements can be a case of legal malpractice. Other examples of malpractice include a inability to include certain claims or defendants such as omitting to make a survival claim in a case of wrongful death or the continual and long-running failure to contact a client.

It's also important to note that it has to be proven that, had it not been for the lawyer's negligence, the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. Otherwise, the plaintiff's claim for malpractice lawyer will be denied. This makes bringing legal malpractice claims difficult. For this reason, it's essential to choose an experienced attorney to represent you.

Damages

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

Malpractice can occur in many different ways. Some of the more common types of malpractice include failing to adhere to a deadline, which includes the statute of limitations, failure to conduct a check on conflicts or other due diligence of a case, improperly applying law to a client's situation and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. Commingling funds from a trust account with an attorney's own accounts or handling a case in a wrong manner, and failing to communicate with the client are all examples of malpractice.

Medical malpractice suits typically involve claims for compensation damages. These compensations are intended to compensate the victim for out-of pocket expenses and losses, such as hospital and medical bills, the cost of equipment to help recover and lost wages. Victims may also claim non-economic damages, such as pain and discomfort and loss of enjoyment their lives, as well as emotional distress.

Legal malpractice cases usually involve claims for compensatory as well as punitive damages. The former compensates victims for the loss resulting from the negligence of an attorney, while the latter is designed to deter future malpractice by the defendant.