Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys have a fiduciary connection with their clients and are required to behave with care, diligence and competence. Attorneys make mistakes, as do other professional.

Not every mistake made by an attorney can be considered legal malpractice. To prove negligence in a legal sense the victim must demonstrate duty, breach of duty, causation, and damage. Let's look at each of these aspects.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors swear an oath to use their knowledge and expertise to treat patients, not causing further harm. A patient's legal right to be compensated for injuries sustained from medical malpractice rests on the concept of duty of care. Your attorney can help you determine whether or not your doctor's actions violated this duty of care, and whether these breaches resulted in harm or illness to your.

Your lawyer has to prove that the medical professional you hired owed the duty of a fiduciary to perform with reasonable competence and care. This relationship may be proven by eyewitness testimony, physician-patient reports and expert testimony from doctors with similar educational, experience and training.

Your lawyer must also prove that the medical professional breached their duty of care by failing to adhere to the accepted standards of practice in their area of expertise. This is often described as negligence. Your attorney will compare what the defendant did to what a reasonable individual would do in the same situation.

Finally, your lawyer must demonstrate that the defendant's breach of duty directly resulted in the loss or injury you suffered. This is referred to as causation. Your attorney will rely on evidence like your doctor-patient reports, witness statements and expert testimony to demonstrate that the defendant's failure to adhere to the standard of care in your case was a direct cause of your loss or injury.

Breach

A doctor owes patients duties of care that conform to the standards of medical professional practice. If a physician fails to adhere to these standards and fails to do so causes injury, then negligence and medical malpractice attorney might occur. Typically expert testimony from medical professionals who have similar training, expertise or certifications will help determine what the appropriate standard of care is in a particular circumstance. Federal and state laws, along with guidelines from the institute, help determine what doctors are required to do for certain types of patients.

To prevail in a malpractice lawsuit, it must be shown that the doctor breached his or their duty of care, and that the breach was the direct cause of injury. In legal terms, this is known as the causation component and it is essential that it is established. For instance, if a broken arm requires an x-ray, the doctor must set the arm and then place it in a cast to ensure proper healing. If the doctor malpractice lawsuit did not perform this task and the patient suffered permanent loss of use of that arm, then malpractice may have occurred.

Causation

Lawyer malpractice claims are based on evidence that the lawyer made errors that resulted in financial losses to the client. For example the lawyer fails to file a lawsuit within the statute of limitations, leading to the case being lost for ever the person who was injured could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

However, it's important to recognize that not all mistakes made by attorneys constitute mistakes that constitute malpractice. Planning and strategy errors are not always considered to be negligence. Attorneys have a broad range of discretion to make decisions as long as they're able to make them in a reasonable manner.

In addition, the law allows attorneys a lot of discretion to conduct discovery on the behalf of clients, so long as it was not negligent or unreasonable. Inability to find important documents or facts, such as medical reports or witness statements, is a potential example of legal malpractice. Other instances of malpractice include failure to add certain claims or defendants for example, like forgetting to submit a survival count in a wrongful death lawsuit, or the repeated and long-running failure to contact a client.

It is also important to consider the fact that the plaintiff has to show that if it wasn't the lawyer's negligence they could have won their case. Otherwise, the plaintiff's claim for malpractice will be rejected. This makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. This is why it's important to choose a seasoned attorney to represent you.

Damages

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

The definition of malpractice can be found in a variety of ways. The most frequent kinds of malpractice are the failure to meet a deadline, including a statute of limitations, failure to perform a conflict check or other due diligence of a case, improperly applying law to a client's situation and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. mixing trust account funds with personal attorney accounts) and mishandling the case, or failing to communicate with the client.

In the majority of medical malpractice cases, the plaintiff will seek compensatory damages. These damages compensate the victim for out-of pocket expenses and losses such as hospital and medical bills, costs of equipment to aid in recovery, and lost wages. Victims can also seek non-economic damages, such as discomfort and pain, loss of enjoyment of their lives, and emotional stress.

In a lot of legal malpractice cases, there are lawsuits for punitive as well as compensatory damages. The former compensates victims for the loss resulting from the negligence of the attorney, whereas the latter is intended to discourage future misconduct by the defendant.