Malpractice What is Malpractice?

Common Types of Malpractice

If you are wondering whether or not you have sufficient grounds to file a malpractice lawsuit, the following information might prove beneficial to you. The most common types of malpractice are medical and legal malpractice, however, accountants and investment advisors have also been sued for malpractice. Here are some questions that you should ask yourself to see if the injury that you have suffered qualifies to be considered malpractice.

First of all, was the injury that you suffered committed by someone who is a professional and has a duty to follow a certain standard of conduct and was his/her failure to act in accord with these standards the direct cause of your injury? For example, doctors and lawyers have professional codes of ethics that they are required by law to follow in order to provide relief to patients and clients. This means that by law, they are required to act to the appropriate level of skill that they have been trained for. If the professional was negligent or guilty of misconduct, accidentally or intentionally, this helps to qualify your malpractice claim.

Proof of Professional Negligence

Professional negligence or misconduct can be difficult to prove. There is a big difference between malpractice and simply making an error in good judgment. In most cases, an expert or several experts in the same field as the accused would be brought into the case to offer his/her opinion as to whether or not the accused professional acted according to industry standards. The expert would be asked to testify how he/she would have handled the situation and whether or not the accused professional did the best he could under the circumstances.

Secondly, did the action (or lack of an action) taken by the professional cause significant damage and was the negligent act the direct cause of the damage? For example, if a misdiagnosis of a certain illness caused a few days delay in recovery, there really wasn’t significant damage. Whereas, the misdiagnosis of cancer that led to the death of a patient is considered significant damage. Again, this can be difficult to prove. Attorneys for the accused might try to say that the cancer was advanced so far that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway and so the misdiagnosis was not the direct cause of death. It’s hard to prove after someone has died exactly how advanced the cancer was at the time of misdiagnosis. It’s also hard to prove that certain injuries or conditions were not related to pre-existing conditions instead of the misconduct of your doctor.

Medical Malpractice

One example of a medical malpractice case that was actually fought and won is a case involving a patient that underwent a procedure called angiography (dye study of the arteries). The procedure was improperly performed, and the patient suffered brain damage. Another example is the case of a trainee anesthesiologist that ran out of oxygen before a operation was completed, causing the patient to suffer a fatal cardiac arrest. And then there was the inexperienced nurse that injected dye too forcefully into a patient and caused the patient to develop pancreatitis and other debilitating injuries. The list is quite lengthy actually and tends to make one shy away from medical procedures altogether.

Legal Malpractice

When it comes to legal malpractice, there are additional requirements that must be established to qualify a malpractice claim. You must prove that you actually had a client/attorney relationship. Usually a receipt of payment(s) for services rendered is sufficient or a copy of the contract between client and attorney. And you must prove that the prior case had merit and was lost because your former attorney did not provide an adequate defense. In other words, if the prior case did not have merit, then nothing was actually lost. Hence, no malpractice claim. You must also be sure that the misconduct was an action of the prior attorney and not just a bad decision on the part of the judge. The following links provide some more insight into medical and legal malpractice claims.

Directory Of Lawyer Disciplinary Agencies

National Practitioner Data Bank

Administrators in Medicine