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Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Attorneys have a fiduciary obligation with their clients and are expected to conduct themselves with diligence, care and competence. But, as with all professionals, attorneys make mistakes.

The errors made by attorneys are considered to be malpractice. To prove legal negligence the victim must demonstrate duty, breach of duty, causation and damage. Let's look at each of these components.

Duty

Medical professionals and doctors take an oath to use their expertise and knowledge to treat patients, not to cause further harm. The duty of care is the foundation for the right of patients to receive compensation in the event of injury due to medical negligence. Your attorney can help you determine whether or not the actions of your doctor violated this duty of care, and whether the breach caused harm or illness to your.

To establish a duty of care, your lawyer needs to show that a medical professional had an official relationship with you, in which they owed you a fiduciary responsibility to exercise an acceptable level of skill and care. This can be proved through eyewitness testimony, doctor-patient reports and expert testimony from doctors with similar education, experience and training.

Your lawyer will also need to prove that the medical professional breached their duty of caring in not adhering to the accepted standards of their area of expertise. This is often called negligence. Your attorney will compare the defendant's behavior with what a reasonable person would do in the same circumstance.

Your lawyer must also demonstrate that the defendant's breach caused direct loss or injury. This is known as causation. Your lawyer will make use of evidence such as your doctor-patient documents, witness statements and expert testimony to demonstrate that the defendant's failure to uphold the standards of care in your case was a direct cause of your loss or injury.

Breach

A doctor has a duty of treatment to his patients that conforms to the highest standards of medical practice. If a doctor doesn't meet the standards, and the failure results in an injury that is medically negligent, negligence could result. Expert testimony from medical professionals who have the same training, malpractice attorney certifications as well as experience and qualifications can help determine the appropriate level of care for a specific situation. State and federal laws, along with institute policies, determine what doctors are required to do for certain types of patients.

In order to win a malpractice claim the evidence must prove that the doctor breached his or her duty of care and that the violation was the sole cause of an injury. In legal terms, this is referred to as the causation component and it is essential that it is established. If a doctor has to take an x-ray of a broken arm, they must place the arm in a cast and properly set it. If the doctor fails to complete this task and the patient suffers a permanent loss of use of the arm, malpractice could have taken place.

Causation

Legal malpractice lawyer claims based on the evidence that the lawyer made errors that resulted in financial losses to the client. Legal malpractice claims can be filed by the injured party for example, if the lawyer fails to file the suit within the prescribed time and results in the case being forever lost.

It is important to recognize that not all mistakes made by lawyers constitute malpractice. Strategy and planning errors are not always considered to be the definition of malpractice attorney. Attorneys have a wide choice of discretion when it comes to making decisions as long as they're in the right place.

The law also grants attorneys ample discretion to refrain from performing discovery for a client in the event that the decision was not arbitrary or negligence. Failure to uncover important information or documents, such as witness statements or medical reports could be a sign of legal malpractice. Other instances of malpractice could be a inability to include certain claims or defendants, such as forgetting to make a survival claim in a wrongful-death case or the frequent and extended failure to communicate with a client.

It's also important that it must be established that but the lawyer's negligence, the plaintiff would have won the underlying case. Otherwise, the plaintiff's claim for malpractice will be denied. This requirement makes it difficult to file an action for legal malpractice. It's essential to choose an experienced attorney to represent you.

Damages

A plaintiff must demonstrate that the lawyer's actions led to actual financial losses in order to prevail in a legal malpractice suit. In a lawsuit, this has to be proved with evidence, such as expert testimony and correspondence between the attorney and the client. In addition the plaintiff must show that a reasonable lawyer could have prevented the damage caused by the attorney's negligence. This is known as proximate causation.

Malpractice can manifest in a number of different ways. The most frequent mistakes include: not meeting the deadline or statute of limitations; not performing a conflict check on cases; applying law improperly to a client's situation; or breaking the fiduciary duty (i.e. mixing trust funds with personal attorney accounts) and mishandling a case, and failing to communicate with clients.

In the majority of medical malpractice cases the plaintiff will seek compensatory damages. They are awarded to the victim in exchange for expenses out of pocket and losses, for example hospital and medical bills, the cost of equipment needed to aid in recovering, and lost wages. In addition, victims may seek non-economic damages, like pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life, and emotional distress.

In many legal malpractice cases, there are cases for punitive and compensatory damages. The first compensates victims for losses caused by the attorney's negligence and the latter is intended to discourage any future malpractice by the defendant's side.