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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are in a fiduciary position with their clients and are required to act with diligence, care and skill. Attorneys make mistakes just like any other professional.

The mistakes made by attorneys are a result of malpractice. To prove negligence in a legal sense the victim must demonstrate duty, breach of duty, causation and damage. Let’s examine each of these aspects.

Duty-Free

Medical professionals and doctors swear by their training and experience to treat patients and not cause further harm. The duty of care is the foundation for a patient’s right to compensation in the event of injury due to medical negligence. Your attorney will determine if the actions of your doctor breached the duty of medical care and if those breaches resulted in your injury or illness.

To establish a duty of care, your lawyer needs to show that a medical professional has an official relationship with you in which they owed you a fiduciary responsibility to perform their duties with reasonable expertise and care. This can be demonstrated through eyewitness testimony, doctor-patient reports and expert testimony from doctors who have similar education, experience, and training.

Your lawyer must also show that the medical professional breached their duty of care by not submitting to the standards of practice that are accepted in their field. This is often referred to as negligence, and your attorney will compare the defendant’s behavior to what a reasonable person would perform in the same situation.

Your lawyer must also show that the defendant’s negligence led directly to your injury or loss. This is referred to as causation, and your attorney will use evidence such as your medical reports, witness statements and expert testimony to show that the defendant’s inability to adhere to the standard of care in your case was a direct cause of your injury or loss.

Breach

A doctor is bound by a duty of treatment to his patients that corresponds to professional medical standards. If a physician fails to meet the standards, and the failure results in an injury and/or medical malpractice, then negligence may occur. Expert testimonials from medical professionals who have similar training, certifications as well as experience and qualifications can help determine the standard of care in any given situation. State and federal laws and institute policies also define what doctors must do for certain types of patients.

In order to win a malpractice claim the case must be proved that the doctor violated his or his duty of care and that this breach was the direct cause of injury. This is known in legal terms as the causation factor and it is imperative to prove it. If a doctor is required to conduct an x-ray examination of an injured arm, they must place the arm in a cast and correctly set it. If the physician failed to perform this task and the patient was left with permanent loss of the use of the arm, then Rocklin Malpractice Lawyer could have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims rely on the evidence that proves that the lawyer’s errors resulted in financial losses for the client. Legal malpractice claims can be filed by the victim if, for example, the lawyer does not file the lawsuit within the timeframes set by the statute of limitations and results in the case being permanently lost.

It is important to realize that not all errors made by lawyers constitute mistakes that constitute malpractice. Strategies and mistakes aren’t usually considered to be a violation of the law attorneys are given lots of freedom to make decisions based on their judgments as long as they’re reasonable.

In addition, the law allows attorneys a lot of discretion to conduct a discovery process on behalf of a client, so long as the action was not unreasonable or negligent. Failing to discover important facts or documents, such as medical reports or statements of witnesses or medical reports, could be an instance of legal malpractice. Other examples of malpractice are a failure to add certain defendants or claims such as omitting to file a survival count in a wrongful-death case or the continual and prolonged inability to communicate with the client.

It is also important to remember that it has to be proven that but the negligence of the lawyer, the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. The claim of the plaintiff for malpractice will be rejected when it isn’t proven. This makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. This is why it’s important to find an experienced attorney to represent you.

Damages

To win a legal malpractice case, a plaintiff must demonstrate actual financial losses that result from the actions of the attorney. In a lawsuit, this has to be demonstrated using evidence, like expert testimony or correspondence between the client and attorney. The plaintiff must also show that a reasonable lawyer could have prevented the harm caused by the negligence of the lawyer. This is referred to as proximate cause.

Malpractice occurs in many ways. The most frequent malpractices include: failing a deadline or statute of limitations; not performing the necessary conflict checks on an instance; applying the law incorrectly to a client’s situation; or breaking the fiduciary obligation (i.e. merging funds from a trust account an attorney’s account, mishandling a case and not communicating with the client are just a few examples of misconduct.

In most medical oak park malpractice attorney cases the plaintiff is seeking compensatory damages. The compensations pay for out-of-pocket expenses as well as losses such as hospital and medical bills, equipment costs to aid in recovery and lost wages. Additionally, victims may claim non-economic damages, like pain and suffering or loss of enjoyment life, and emotional stress.

In many legal malpractice cases there are lawsuits for punitive as well as compensatory damages. The former is intended to compensate victims for losses due to the negligence of the attorney and the latter is intended to discourage future malpractice on the defendant’s part.