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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys hold a fiduciary relationship with their clients and are required to act with care, diligence and expertise. Attorneys make mistakes, as do other professional.

A mistake made by an attorney can be considered negligence. To prove negligence in a legal sense the person who was hurt must prove the breach of duty, duty, causation, and damages. Let’s look at each of these elements.

Duty-Free

Doctors and other medical professionals swear to use their education and skills to cure patients and not cause further harm. The legal right of a patient to be compensated for injuries sustained from medical malpractice hinges on the notion of duty of care. Your attorney will determine if the actions of your doctor breached the duty of care and whether these violations caused injury or illness.

To prove a duty to care, your lawyer will need to demonstrate that a medical professional has an agreement with you and owed you a fiduciary responsibility to act with a reasonable level of skill and care. Establishing that this relationship existed may require evidence such as the records of your doctor and patient, eyewitness statements and experts from doctors with similar experience, education and training.

Your lawyer must also show that the medical professional violated their duty of care by not submitting to the accepted standards of practice in their area of expertise. This is often called negligence, and your attorney will evaluate the defendant’s conduct with what a reasonable person would do in the same situation.

Your lawyer must also show that the defendant’s negligence directly caused your loss or injury. This is referred to as causation, and your attorney will use evidence like your doctor-patient documents, witness statements, and expert testimony to show that the defendant’s inability to meet the standard of care in your case was the direct cause of your loss or injury.

Breach

A doctor is bound by a duty of care for his patients that conforms to the highest standards of medical practice. If a physician fails to adhere to these standards and fails to do so results in injury, medical malpractice and negligence could occur. Typically expert testimony from medical professionals who have similar training, expertise or certifications will help determine what the appropriate standard of treatment should be in a particular circumstance. State and federal laws and institute policies also help determine what doctors should provide for specific kinds of patients.

To prevail in a malpractice lawsuit, it must be proven that the doctor violated his or her duty to care and that this violation was a direct reason for an injury. In legal terms, this is known as the causation component and it is crucial that it is established. If a doctor is required to obtain an xray of an injured arm, they have to put the arm in a cast and then correctly set it. If the doctor failed to complete the procedure and the patient was left with an irreparable loss of the use of the arm, then malpractice may have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims rely on evidence that shows the attorney’s errors caused financial losses to the client. For instance the lawyer does not file an action within the timeframe of limitations, leading to the case being lost for ever the person who was injured can file legal malpractice claims.

It is important to understand that not all errors made by attorneys are little falls malpractice law firm. Strategy and planning errors are not always considered to be negligence. Attorneys have a wide range of discretion to make decisions, as long as they’re able to make them in a reasonable manner.

Likewise, the law gives attorneys a wide range of options to refuse to conduct a discovery process on a client’s behalf, as provided that the decision was not negligent or unreasonable. Failure to uncover important details or documents like medical reports or statements of witnesses, is a potential example of legal malpractice. Other instances of malpractice could be a failure to add certain claims or defendants, such as forgetting to include a survival count in a wrongful death lawsuit, or the repeated and persistent failure to communicate with the client.

It is also important to keep in mind the fact that the plaintiff needs to demonstrate that, if it weren’t for the lawyer’s negligent conduct, they could have won their case. If not, the plaintiff’s claims for edgewood malpractice law firm will be rejected. This makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. It is essential to choose an experienced attorney.

Damages

To win a legal malpractice lawsuit plaintiffs must show financial losses caused by the actions of an attorney. In a lawsuit, this must be proven with evidence such as expert testimony and correspondence between the attorney and client. The plaintiff must also show that a reasonable lawyer could have prevented the damage caused by the negligence of the lawyer. This is referred to as the proximate cause.

Malpractice occurs in many ways. Some of the most common kinds of malpractice are the failure to meet a deadline, such as the statute of limitations, failure to perform a conflict check or any other due diligence on a case, improperly applying the law to the client’s situation and breaching a fiduciary responsibility (i.e. mixing funds from a trust account with the attorney’s own accounts as well as not communicating with the client are all examples of malpractice.

In most medical malpractice cases the plaintiff will seek compensatory damages. They are awarded to the victim in exchange for out-of-pocket expenses and losses, like hospital and medical bills, costs of equipment required to aid in healing, as well as lost wages. In addition, the victims can seek non-economic damages, like pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life and emotional distress.

In a lot of legal malpractice cases there are lawsuits for punitive as well as compensatory damages. The former is intended to compensate the victim for the damages caused by negligence on the part of the attorney while the latter is intended to discourage future malpractice on the defendant’s part.