15 Terms Everybody Who Works In Malpractice Attorney Industry Should Know > 문의하기

Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys hold a fiduciary relationship with their clients and are required to act with care, diligence and competence. However, just like any other professional, attorneys make mistakes.

Every mistake made by an attorney constitutes malpractice. To prove legal negligence the aggrieved party must prove the breach of duty, obligation, causation, and damage. Let's look at each of these elements.

Duty-Free

Medical professionals and doctors take an oath that they will use their knowledge and expertise to cure patients, not cause additional harm. A patient's legal right to receive compensation for injuries resulting from medical malpractice hinges on the notion of the duty of care. Your attorney will determine if your doctor's actions violated the duty of care and if these breaches resulted in your injury or illness.

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

Your lawyer will also need to show that the medical professional violated their duty of caring by failing to follow the accepted standards of their field. This is often referred to by the term negligence. Your attorney will compare the actions of the defendant to what a reasonable individual would do in the same situation.

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

Breach

A doctor owes patients duties of care that are consistent with the standards of medical professional practice. If a physician fails to meet those standards, and the failure results in an injury that is medically negligent, negligence could result. Typically the testimony of medical professionals with similar training, skills, certifications and experience will aid in determining what the best standard of treatment should be in a particular situation. Federal and state laws, as well as guidelines from the institute, help define what doctors are required to provide for specific types of patients.

To prevail in a malpractice case it is necessary to prove that the doctor violated his or their duty of care, and that this breach was the direct cause of an injury. This is referred to in legal terms as the causation element and it is essential to prove it. If a doctor has to take an x-ray of a broken arm, they must put the arm in a casting and correctly place it. If the doctor fails to do this and malpractice lawsuits the patient loses their use of the arm, malpractice lawsuits then malpractice may have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims are based on the evidence that the attorney made mistakes that caused financial losses for the client. For example when a lawyer fails to file an action within the timeframe of limitations, leading to the case being lost for ever the party who suffered damages could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

It is crucial to be aware that not all errors made by attorneys are wrong. The mistakes that involve strategy and planning are not generally considered to be malpractice attorneys have lots of freedom to make judgment calls as long as they're reasonable.

Likewise, the law gives attorneys a wide range of options to refuse to perform discovery on behalf of a client, so long as the action was not unreasonable or negligent. Failing to discover important documents or facts like medical reports or witness statements can be a case of legal malpractice. Other instances of malpractice include failure to add certain claims or defendants such as omitting to make a survival claim in a wrongful-death case, or the repeated and extended inability to communicate with the client.

It is also important to remember the necessity for the plaintiff to prove that, if not for the lawyer's careless conduct they would have won their case. The claim of malpractice by the plaintiff is rejected in the event that it is not proved. This makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. For this reason, it's important to choose a seasoned attorney to represent you.

Damages

A plaintiff must demonstrate that the lawyer's actions led to actual financial losses in order to win a legal malpractice lawsuit. This can be proven in a lawsuit by utilizing evidence like expert testimony, correspondence between client and attorney along with billing records and other documentation. A plaintiff must also prove that a reasonable lawyer could have prevented the harm caused by the lawyer's negligence. This is referred to 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, such as a statute of limitations, a failure to perform a conflict check or other due diligence on the case, not applying law to a client's situation and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. mixing funds from a trust account with an attorney's own accounts, mishandling a case and not communicating with the client are all examples of malpractice.

In most medical malpractice cases the plaintiff is seeking compensation damages. These compensations are intended to compensate the victim for out-of-pocket expenses as well as losses, such as medical and hospitals bills, equipment costs to help recover and lost wages. Victims can also seek non-economic damages such as pain and discomfort and loss of enjoyment their lives, as well as emotional distress.

Legal malpractice cases usually involve claims for compensatory or punitive damages. The first compensates the victim for the damages caused by negligence on the part of the attorney while the latter is designed to discourage any future malpractice on the part of the defendant.