Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are in a fiduciary position with their clients and are expected to behave with care, diligence and expertise. However, like all professionals, attorneys make mistakes.

A mistake made by an attorney constitutes malpractice. To prove legal malpractice, an victim must prove obligation, breach, causation and damage. Let's examine each of these elements.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors swear by their training and experience to help patients and not to 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 determine if the actions of your doctor breached the duty of care and if those breaches caused you injury or illness.

Your lawyer must demonstrate that the medical professional in question owed you a fiduciary duty to act with reasonable skill and care. This relationship can be established through eyewitness testimony, doctor-patient records and expert testimony of doctors with similar education, experience, and training.

Your lawyer will also need to demonstrate that the medical professional breached their duty of care in not adhering to the accepted standards of their area of expertise. This is often called negligence, and your attorney will compare the defendant's behavior with what a reasonable person would perform in the same situation.

Your lawyer must also show that the defendant's breach directly caused your loss or injury. This is referred to as causation. Your lawyer will rely on evidence, such as your doctor/patient reports, malpractice witness testimony and expert testimony, to prove that the defendant's failure comply with the standard of care was the main cause of injury or loss to you.

Breach

A doctor is required to perform a duty of care to his patients which conforms to the highest standards of medical practice. If a physician fails to meet those standards and this results in injury, negligence and medical malpractice might occur. Expert evidence from medical professionals who possess similar qualifications, training, skills and experience can help determine the standard of care in any given situation. Federal and state laws, as well as policies of the institute, help define what doctors are required to do for certain types of patients.

To win a malpractice case it must be proven that the doctor breached his or their duty of care, and that this breach was a direct cause of injury. This is referred to in legal terms as the causation factor and it is vital that it be established. If a doctor is required to take an x-ray of an injured arm, they must put the arm in a cast and then correctly place it. If the doctor failed to do this and the patient suffered a permanent loss of the use of the arm, then malpractice may have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims are based on the evidence that proves that the lawyer's errors caused financial losses to the client. For example the lawyer does not file an action within the timeframe of limitations, which results in the case being lost forever and the victim can bring legal malpractice actions.

However, it's important to recognize that not all mistakes made by attorneys are malpractice. Mistakes in strategy and planning do not typically constitute malpractice attorneys have lots of freedom to make decisions based on their judgments as long as they are reasonable.

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

It's also important that it must be established that but the negligence of the lawyer, the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. If not, the plaintiff's claims for malpractice will be rejected. This requirement makes bringing legal malpractice claims difficult. It is crucial to find an experienced attorney.

Damages

To prevail in a legal malpractice lawsuit, the plaintiff must show 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 attorney and the client. A plaintiff must also demonstrate that a reasonable attorney could have prevented the damage caused by the lawyer's negligence. This is known as the proximate cause.

Malpractice can occur in many different ways. Some of the more common types of malpractice include failing to meet a deadline, for example, a statute of limitation, failure to perform a conflict check or other due diligence of the case, not applying law to a client's circumstance, breaching a fiduciary duty (i.e. Commingling funds from a trust account an attorney's own accounts or handling a case improperly and failing to communicate with the client are all examples of malpractice.

Medical malpractice lawsuits typically include claims for compensatory damages. These compensations are intended to compensate the victim for out-of-pocket expenses as well as expenses like medical and hospitals bills, the cost of equipment to help recover and lost wages. In addition, the victims can claim non-economic damages, like pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life, and emotional distress.

Legal malpractice cases often involve claims for compensatory or punitive damages. The former compensates a victim for the loss resulting from the negligence of an attorney, while the latter is designed to deter future malpractice by the defendant.