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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys have a fiduciary responsibilities to their clients and they must behave with skill, diligence and care. Attorneys make mistakes just like any other professional.

Every mistake made by an attorney can be considered malpractice. To prove legal malpractice, an aggrieved party must show obligation, breach, causation and damage. Let's take a look at each of these components.

Duty-Free

Doctors and other medical professionals swear to use their education and experience to help patients and not cause further harm. A patient's legal right to compensation for injuries sustained from medical malpractice hinges on the notion of duty of care. Your attorney can help you determine whether or not the actions of your doctor violated this duty of care, and whether those breaches caused injury or illness to you.

Your lawyer must establish that the medical professional you hired owed a fiduciary duty to act with reasonable skill and care. Establishing that this relationship existed could require evidence like your records of your doctor-patient relationship, eyewitness statements and experts from doctors with similar experiences, education and training.

Your lawyer will also have to show that the medical professional breached their duty of caring by failing to follow the accepted standards of their field. This is often described as negligence. Your attorney will compare what the defendant did with what a reasonable person would do in the same situation.

Your lawyer will also need to prove that the defendant's breach directly caused your injury or loss. This is called causation. Your lawyer will rely on evidence, such as your doctor/patient documents, witness testimony and expert testimony, to demonstrate that the defendant's inability to comply with the standard of care was the direct cause of your injury or loss to you.

Breach

A doctor is bound by a duty of treatment to his patients that corresponds to professional medical standards. If a doctor does not live up to those standards and fails to do so results in injury, negligence and medical malpractice might occur. Expert evidence from medical professionals who have the same training, certifications or experience can help determine the appropriate level of care in any given situation. Federal and state laws and institute policies also help determine what doctors are required to do for certain types of patients.

To win a malpractice case it is necessary to prove that the doctor violated his or duty of care and that the breach was a direct cause of injury. In legal terms, this is called the causation element and it is vital that it is established. If a physician has to take an x-ray of a broken arm, they have to put the arm in a cast and correctly place it. If the doctor did not complete the procedure and the patient was left with a permanent loss of use of that arm, then malpractice could have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims rely on evidence that demonstrates that the attorney's errors caused financial losses to the client. For instance, if a lawyer does not file an action within the timeframe of limitations, leading to the case being lost for ever the party who suffered damages can bring legal malpractice actions.

It is important to realize that not all mistakes made by attorneys are malpractice. Errors involving strategy and planning do not typically constitute malpractice attorneys have a lot of latitude to make judgement calls so long as they are reasonable.

The law also grants attorneys ample discretion to refrain from performing discovery on behalf of a client in the event that the decision was not arbitrary or a case of negligence. Inability to find important information or documents, such as medical or witness statements could be a sign of legal malpractice. Other examples of malpractice include a inability to include certain defendants or claims such as omitting to include a survival count in a wrongful-death case or the consistent and extended inability to communicate with clients.

It is also important to keep in mind the necessity for the plaintiff to demonstrate that, if it weren't for the lawyer's careless conduct they would have won their case. If not, the plaintiff's claims for malpractice will be rejected. This makes bringing legal malpractice claims difficult. For this reason, it's crucial to hire an experienced attorney to represent you.

Damages

In order to prevail in a legal malpractice lawsuit the plaintiff must prove actual financial losses incurred by an attorney's actions. In the case of a lawsuit this has to be demonstrated using evidence, such as expert testimony and correspondence between the client and attorney. A plaintiff must also demonstrate that a reasonable attorney would 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 more common types of malpractice include the failure to adhere to a deadline, which includes the statute of limitations, a failure to conduct a conflict check or other due diligence check on the case, not applying law to a client's circumstance or breaching a fiduciary obligation (i.e. Commingling funds from a trust account with an attorney's own accounts or handling a case improperly and not communicating with the client are all examples of malpractice.

Medical malpractice suits typically involve claims for compensatory damages. The compensations pay for the cost of out-of-pocket expenses and expenses like hospital and medical bills, equipment costs to aid recovery, and lost wages. Victims can also seek non-economic damages like pain and discomfort and loss of enjoyment their lives, and emotional suffering.

Legal malpractice cases usually involve claims for compensatory as well as punitive damages. The former compensates a victim for losses resulting from the negligence of the attorney, whereas the latter is intended to deter future malpractice by the defendant.