15 Up-And-Coming Malpractice Attorney Bloggers You Need To See

Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys are bound by a fiduciary obligation to their clients and they must behave with a high degree of skill, diligence and care. Attorneys make mistakes, just like any other professional.

The errors made by attorneys are legal malpractice. To establish legal malpractice, the aggrieved party has to prove obligation, breach, causation and damages. Let's take a look at each of these elements.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors swear an oath to apply their knowledge and expertise to cure patients, not to cause further harm. A patient's legal right to be compensated for injuries sustained from medical malpractice rests on the notion of the duty of care. Your attorney can help you determine if your doctor's actions violated the duty of care, and if those breaches caused harm or illness to your.

Your lawyer must prove that the medical professional you hired owed the fiduciary obligation to act with reasonable competence and care. This relationship can be established through eyewitness testimony, malpractice lawsuit doctor-patient documents and expert testimony from doctors with similar educational, experience and training.

Your lawyer will also need to show that the medical professional breached their duty to care by failing to adhere to the accepted standards of their area of expertise. This is often referred to as negligence. Your lawyer will assess the conduct of the defendant with what a reasonable person would take in the same scenario.

Your lawyer must show that the defendant's breach of duty directly led to injury or loss to you. This is known as causation, and your lawyer will make use of evidence like your medical documents, witness statements, and expert testimony to prove that the defendant's failure to live up to the standards of care in your case was the direct cause of your injury or loss.

Breach

A doctor owes patients duties of care that reflect the standards of medical professional practice. If a physician fails to meet the standards, and the resulting failure causes an injury, then medical malpractice or negligence can occur. Typically expert testimony from medical professionals with similar training, skills and experience, malpractice lawsuit as well as certifications and certificates will help determine what the standard of care should be in a specific situation. State and federal laws, as well as guidelines from the institute, help define what doctors are required to do for certain types of patients.

To prevail in a malpractice lawsuit it must be proven that the doctor violated his or his duty of care and that the breach was the direct cause of injury. This is referred to in legal terms as the causation element, and it is vital to establish. If a physician has to obtain an xray of a broken arm, they have to put the arm in a cast and correctly set it. If the doctor fails to do this and the patient suffers a permanent loss of use of the arm, then malpractice may have occurred.

Causation

Attorney malpractice claims rely on evidence that the attorney's mistakes resulted in financial losses for the client. For example, if a lawyer does not file a lawsuit within the statute of limitations, leading to the case being lost for ever the party who suffered damages could bring legal malpractice lawsuits.

It is important to realize that not all errors made by attorneys are malpractice. Errors involving strategy and planning aren't usually considered to be a violation of the law, and attorneys have plenty of discretion in making judgment calls so long as they are reasonable.

The law also allows lawyers ample discretion to refrain from performing discovery on behalf of a client in the event that the failure was not unreasonable or a result of negligence. Failing to discover important facts 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 the mistake of not remembering a survival number for wrongful death cases or the constant failure to communicate with clients.

It is also important to consider the necessity for the plaintiff to prove that if not for the lawyer's careless conduct they would have won their case. The plaintiff's claim of malpractice is rejected when it isn't proven. This makes the process of bringing legal malpractice lawsuits difficult. Therefore, it's important to find an experienced attorney to represent you.

Damages

A plaintiff must prove that the attorney's actions resulted in actual financial losses in order to prevail in a legal malpractice lawsuit. In a lawsuit, this needs to be proven through evidence, like expert testimony or correspondence between the attorney and client. In addition, the plaintiff must prove that a reasonable lawyer could have avoided the harm that was caused by the attorney's negligence. 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 a statute of limitations, failure to conduct a check on conflicts or other due diligence check on the case, not applying law to a client's situation, breaching a fiduciary duty (i.e. mixing trust account funds with personal attorney accounts) and mishandling the case, and not communicating with clients.

In most medical malpractice cases, the plaintiff will seek compensation damages. The compensations pay for the cost of out-of-pocket expenses and expenses like medical and hospitals bills, equipment costs to aid in recovery and lost wages. Victims may also claim non-economic damages, such as discomfort and pain and loss of enjoyment their lives, and emotional distress.

Legal malpractice attorneys cases usually involve claims for compensatory and punitive damages. The former compensates a victim for losses caused by the negligence of an attorney, while the latter is designed to deter any future malpractice committed by the defendant.