Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys have a fiduciary obligation with their clients and are expected to conduct themselves with diligence, care and skill. However, like all professionals attorneys make mistakes.

Every mistake made by an attorney can be considered malpractice. To prove negligence in a legal sense the victim must demonstrate obligation, breach of obligation, causation, and damages. Let's take a look at each of these aspects.

Duty-Free

Medical professionals and doctors take an oath that they will use their expertise and knowledge to cure patients, not causing further harm. The legal right of a patient to compensation for injuries sustained from medical malpractice rests on the notion of the duty of care. Your attorney can help you determine if your doctor's actions violated the duty of care, and if these breaches resulted in injury or illness to you.

To establish a duty of care, your lawyer will need to show that a medical professional had a legal relationship with you in which they were bound by a fiduciary duty to perform their duties with a reasonable level of skill and care. This relationship may be proven through eyewitness testimony, doctor-patient reports and expert testimony from doctors who have similar education, experience, and training.

Your lawyer will also need to prove that the medical professional breached their duty of caring by failing to follow the accepted standards of their field. This is often known as negligence. Your lawyer will assess the actions of the defendant to what a reasonable person would do in a similar situation.

Your lawyer must also show that the breach of the defendant's duty directly contributed to your loss or injury. This is known as causation. Your attorney will use evidence such as your medical reports, witness statements and expert testimony to show that the defendant's failure to meet the standards of care in your case was a direct cause of your injury or loss.

Breach

A doctor has a duty of care to his patients that conforms to the highest standards of medical practice. If a doctor does not adhere to these standards and fails to do so results in injury, negligence and medical malpractice might occur. Typically, expert testimony from medical professionals with similar qualifications, training and certifications will help determine what the standard of care is in a particular situation. Federal and state laws and institute policies also help determine what doctors should do for certain types of patients.

To be successful in a malpractice case it must be established that the doctor acted in violation of his or her duty to take care of patients and that the breach was a direct reason for an injury. In legal terms, this is referred to as the causation element and it is vital to establish. If a physician has to take an x-ray of a broken arm, they have to put the arm in a casting and correctly set it. If the doctor failed to do this and the patient was left with a permanent loss of function of that arm, then garden city malpractice law firm could have occurred.

Causation

Attorney york malpractice law firm claims are based on evidence that the attorney committed mistakes that caused financial losses for the client. Legal malpractice claims may be brought by the person who was injured for example, if the attorney is unable to file a lawsuit within the timeframe of the statute of limitations and this results in the case being permanently lost.

It is important to understand that not all errors made by attorneys are illegal. The mistakes that involve strategy and planning do not typically constitute malpractice and lawyers have the ability to make judgment calls as long as they're reasonable.

Likewise, the law gives attorneys a wide range of options to refuse to conduct a discovery process on the behalf of their clients, as in the event that it is not unreasonable or negligent. Failing to discover important details or documents like medical reports or statements of witnesses could be a sign of legal malpractice. Other instances of malpractice could be a inability to include certain defendants or claims, such as forgetting to submit a survival count in a case of wrongful death or the frequent and long-running inability to contact clients.

It is also important to remember that it must be established that if it weren't the negligence of the lawyer, the plaintiff would have won the case. Otherwise, the plaintiff's claim for malpractice will be rejected. This requirement makes bringing legal malpractice claims difficult. It's crucial to hire an experienced attorney.

Damages

A plaintiff must show that the attorney's actions caused actual financial losses in order to prevail in a legal malpractice suit. In the case of a lawsuit this has to be demonstrated using evidence, such as expert testimony and correspondence between the attorney and client. A plaintiff must also demonstrate that a reasonable attorney could have prevented the harm caused by the lawyer's negligence. This is referred to as proximate cause.

The causes of malpractice vary. The most frequent kinds of malpractice are the failure to meet a deadline, including a statute of limitations, failing to perform a conflict check or any other due diligence on a case, improperly applying law to a client's situation and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. commingling trust account funds with attorney's personal accounts) and mishandling the case, or failing to communicate with clients.

Medical malpractice lawsuits typically include claims for compensation damages. These compensations are intended to compensate the victim for out-of pocket expenses and expenses like hospital and medical bills, equipment costs to aid in recovery, and lost wages. In addition, the victims can claim non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering or loss of enjoyment life, and emotional stress.

Legal malpractice cases typically involve claims for compensatory or punitive damages. The former is intended to compensate the victim for losses caused by the attorney's negligence while the latter is designed to discourage future malpractice on the part of the defendant.