Medical And Legal Malpractice Case Process
1. Contact the office
If you think you or a loved one is a victim of medical malpractice, contact us for a free case review. You can call, email, or fill out our contact form. Someone, most likely Emily, will be in touch to gather more information about your case. It is very helpful if you have any documents gathered together in one place. A timeline is also very helpful. For your case review, we will need the names of the healthcare providers that you think made a mistake, the names of any hospitals or doctor’s offices, and the dates on which you believe mistakes were made.
2. Initial Evaluation
We have been legal and medical malpractice trial lawyers for a long time. Sometimes, we will know right away that you do not have a case. You may have waited too long to sue, your injury might be a recognized risk, it might be too hard to prove that the malpractice caused your injury, or the cost of paying experts might be higher than we think you would recover. We will always be completely honest with you.
If we think your lawyer or healthcare provider might have made a mistake, and we think that mistake caused you an injury, then we will hire experts to make sure we are right. We will ask you to gather all of your records, and then we will send your records to the experts.
It can take a long time for an expert review. If the experts are not supportive on both breach of the standard of care and causation, then the investigation ends. But if the medical experts believe your former doctor, nurse, other healthcare provider or lawyer made a mistake that caused your injury, then the case will continue.
3. Pre-suit settlement or litigation
Lawsuits take a long time and cost a lot of money. So, we always try to settle your case without needing to file a lawsuit in Court. We write a demand letter in legal malpractice cases. In medical malpractice cases, the law requires us to serve a Notice of Intent and then wait 182 days before filing the lawsuit. Sometimes, we will send a demand letter before the Notice of Intent. Very few medical malpractice cases settle without filing a lawsuit. More legal malpractice cases do, though.
If we can’t settle your case, we will file a lawsuit and begin litigation. You can read about the litigation process here.