Medical Malpractice Lawsuits
Attorneys are required to fulfill a fiduciary responsibility to their clients, and they must act with a degree of diligence, skill and care. But, as with all professionals, attorneys make mistakes.
Not all mistakes made by lawyers are legal malpractice. To demonstrate legal malpractice, an aggrieved party has to prove the breach of duty, duty, causation and damages. Let's examine each of these elements.
Duty-Free
Medical professionals and doctors swear the oath of using their knowledge and expertise to treat patients, and not cause additional harm. The legal right of a patient to compensation for injuries suffered from medical malpractice rests on the notion of the duty of care. Your attorney will determine if your doctor's actions breached the duty of medical care and if those breaches resulted in injury or illness.
To prove a duty to care, your lawyer must to demonstrate that a medical professional had an legal relationship with you and have a fiduciary obligation to act with reasonable expertise and care. This can be demonstrated by eyewitness testimony of witnesses, doctor-patient reports and expert testimony from doctors with similar educational, experience and training.
Your lawyer will also have to establish that the medical professional breached their duty to care in not adhering to the accepted standards of their area of expertise. This is typically called negligence. Your attorney will compare the actions of the defendant to what a reasonable individual would do in a similar situation.
Then, your lawyer has to prove that the defendant's lapse of duty directly resulted in damage or loss to you. This is referred to as causation. Your attorney will rely on evidence like your doctor-patient records, witness statements and expert testimony to show that the defendant's inability to adhere to the standard of care in your case was the direct cause of your injury or loss.
Breach
A doctor is bound by a duty of treatment to his patients that is in line with professional medical standards. If a doctor does not meet these standards and that failure results in injury, then negligence and medical malpractice might occur. Typically, expert testimony from medical professionals with similar training, skills, certifications and experience will aid in determining what the best standard of care is in a particular circumstance. Federal and state laws, along with guidelines from the institute, help define what doctors are expected to do for certain types of patients.
In order to win a malpractice claim it is necessary to prove that the doctor breached his or duty of care and that the breach was a direct cause of injury. In legal terms, this is known as the causation element and it is crucial that it is established. If a doctor needs to take an x-ray of an injured arm, they must place the arm in a cast and correctly place it. If the physician failed to do this and the patient was left with an unavoidable loss of use of the arm, then malpractice could have occurred.
Causation
Attorney
malpractice attorneys claims are based on evidence that a lawyer made mistakes that resulted in financial losses for the client. Legal malpractice claims may be brought by the person who was injured for example, if the lawyer does not file the lawsuit within the timeframes set by the statute of limitations, which results in the case being thrown out forever.
It's important to recognize that not all mistakes by attorneys are malpractice. Planning and strategy errors do not usually constitute negligence. Attorneys have a broad range of discretion to make decisions as long as they're able to make them in a reasonable manner.
Additionally, the law grants attorneys a wide range of options to refuse to conduct discovery on behalf of a client, so provided that the decision was not unreasonable or negligent. Failure to uncover important details or documents like medical or witness statements, is a potential example of legal malpractice. Other examples of malpractice are the inability to add certain defendants or claims, for instance failing to include a survival count for a wrongful-death case or the recurrent failure to communicate with clients.
It is also important to remember that it must be established that, had it not been the negligence of the lawyer, the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. The plaintiff's claim for
malpractice Attorney will be rejected if it is not proven. This requirement makes bringing legal malpractice claims difficult. It's crucial to hire an experienced attorney.
Damages
In order to prevail in a legal malpractice lawsuit the plaintiff must show actual financial losses caused by the actions of the attorney. This must be shown in a lawsuit through evidence like expert testimony, correspondence between the client and attorney or billing records, and other evidence. In addition the plaintiff must show that a reasonable lawyer would have prevented the harm that was caused by the negligence of the attorney. This is known as proximate cause.
The causes of malpractice vary. Some of the more common kinds of malpractice are: failing to meet a deadline, such as the statute of limitation, failure to conduct a check on conflicts or any other due diligence on a case, improperly applying law to a client's situation or breaking a fiduciary duty (i.e. merging funds from a trust account the attorney's own accounts, mishandling a case and failing to communicate with the client are all examples of malpractice.
In most medical malpractice cases the plaintiff is seeking compensation damages. They compensate the victim for the expenses out of pocket and losses, such as medical and hospital bills, costs of equipment required to aid in healing, as well as lost wages. Additionally, victims may claim non-economic damages, like suffering and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life and emotional suffering.
In a lot of legal malpractice cases there are claims for punitive or compensatory damages. The former compensates victims for the losses caused by the negligence of the attorney, whereas the latter is intended to deter any future malpractice committed by the defendant.