Medical Malpractice Lawsuits
Attorneys are required to fulfill a fiduciary responsibility to their clients, and are required to act with a high degree of skill, diligence and care. But, as with all professionals, attorneys make mistakes.
Every mistake made by an attorney is malpractice. To demonstrate legal malpractice, an victim must prove duty, breach, causation and damages. Let’s look at each of these aspects.
Duty-Free
Doctors and other medical professionals swear to use their training and experience to help patients and not to cause harm to others. Duty of care is the basis for the right of patients to receive compensation for injuries caused by medical negligence. Your attorney can help you determine if the actions of your doctor violated this duty of care, and whether these breaches resulted in injuries or illness to you.
To prove a duty of care, your lawyer needs to show that a medical professional has a legal relationship with you, in which they were bound by a fiduciary duty to act with an acceptable level of skill and care. This relationship can be established by eyewitness testimony of witnesses, doctor-patient documents and expert testimony from doctors with similar education, experience and training.
Your lawyer will also have to demonstrate that the medical professional violated their duty of caring by failing to adhere to the accepted standards of their field. This is often called negligence. Your lawyer will compare the defendant’s behavior with what a reasonable person would take in the same scenario.
Then, your lawyer has to prove that the defendant’s lapse of duty directly resulted in injury or loss to you. This is referred to as causation, and your lawyer will make use of evidence such as your doctor-patient reports, 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 obligated to patients to perform duties of care that are consistent with the standards of medical professional practice. If a doctor doesn’t adhere to these standards and the result is an injury that is medically negligent, negligence can occur. Expert evidence from medical professionals who possess similar qualifications, training as well as experience and qualifications can help determine the level of care in any given situation. Federal and state laws, along with institute policies, help determine what doctors are required to do for certain types of patients.
To be successful in a malpractice case it must be proved that the doctor violated his or her duty to take care of patients and that the breach was the primary cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is referred to as the causation component and it is vital that it is established. If a physician has to perform an x-ray on an injured arm, they must place the arm in a cast and correctly set it. If the doctor is unable to do this and the patient is left with a permanent loss of use of the arm, malpractice may have taken place.
Causation
Attorney malpractice claims are based on the evidence that proves that the lawyer’s mistakes resulted in financial losses for the client. For example, if a lawyer fails to file a lawsuit within the prescribed time of limitations, leading to the case being lost forever, the injured party could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.
It’s important to know that not all errors made by attorneys are considered to be malpractice. Planning and strategy errors are not typically considered to be negligence. Attorneys have a wide range of discretion in making decisions so long as they’re able to make them in a reasonable manner.
The law also gives 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. Legal malpractice can be caused by not obtaining crucial documents or facts, like medical reports or witness statements. Other examples of malpractice are the failure to include certain defendants or claims, like failing to include a survival count for a wrongful-death case or the recurrent failure to communicate with clients.
It’s also important that it must be proved that if it weren’t the negligence of the lawyer the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. The plaintiff’s claim of malpractice will be rejected if it’s not proved. This makes the filing of legal malpractice claims a challenge. It is essential to choose an experienced attorney.
Damages
A plaintiff must show that the attorney’s actions have caused actual financial losses to win a legal hazel park malpractice lawsuit suit. In a lawsuit, this has to be proven through evidence, such as expert testimony and correspondence between the attorney and the client. In addition the plaintiff must demonstrate that a reasonable lawyer would have avoided the damage caused by the attorney’s negligence. This is called proximate causation.
Malpractice can occur in many different ways. The most frequent malpractices include: failing an expiration date or statute of limitations; not conducting the necessary conflict checks on an instance; applying the law improperly to a client’s specific circumstances; and violating the fiduciary obligation (i.e. mixing funds from a trust account with the attorney’s own accounts, mishandling a case and not communicating with the client are all examples of greenville malpractice lawsuit.
In most medical malpractice cases the plaintiff will seek compensatory damages. These compensations are intended to compensate the victim for expenses out of pocket and expenses like medical and hospitals bills, costs of equipment to help recover and lost wages. In addition, victims can seek non-economic damages, like pain and suffering as well as loss of enjoyment life, and emotional stress.
Legal malpractice cases usually involve claims for compensatory or punitive damages. The former compensates a victim for losses caused by the attorney’s negligence, while the latter is designed to deter future malpractice by the defendant.