Why Call Right Away?
In this article, I want to talk about why it is important for you to talk to a lawyer right away if you’ve been involved in a medical malpractice case.
So, if you or a loved one has been injured or God forbid killed or hurt seriously by a medical mistake. Like mistake at a hospital, a mistake by a doctor, a misdiagnosis, treating the wrong part of the body, whatever the mistake it is that the doctor made. That's what's termed medical malpractice and that's a special kind of case I talk more about it in other articles.
But some doctors have more protection than anybody else. Well, maybe governments, but you and I could get sued much easier than a doctor. Because in a medical malpractice case, if you want to sue a doctor or a hospital, you need to get a report before you file a lawsuit. You need to get all the medical records; you need to have a doctor in the same specialty to review what happened and write a report saying it's malpractice.
Medical Malpractice Cases Are Expensive
As you can imagine, it's often difficult to get a doctor to say something against another doctor. So, we usually need a very clear case of negligence or big mistake. Because medical malpractice cases are so expensive, the reason is we need to have multiple experts in those cases. We need an injury or an outcome that's really bad.
And I do get a lot of calls from people all the time who call me, and they narrowly averted a really bad things like amputation of the wrong leg or you know they got sick and could have died. But they made a full recovery, well we need a big enough injury in a medical malpractice case to offset how much time and money the lawyers must spend to prove the case. Because medical malpractice cases don't often settle a lot of times, they go to trial.
So, why do you need to talk to a lawyer right away on a medical malpractice case? Well, before we can file a lawsuit, we need to order every medical record we need to know what your medical outcome is. And then, we need to summarize the records and then send the summary and the medical records to a doctor. Then the doctor charges us thousands of dollars to review those records and give us an opinion. So, all that needs to happen before we even know if we have a case that can be won.
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It Takes Time To Get Medical Records
Sometimes, if the hospital suspects there's been a mistake or there's been a death. What they do is they will often delay sending you the records and a lot of times it's a fight for me to get the complete set of records or they'll hold back part of the records and not produce all of them. It does happen that I produce records to a doctor to review for medical malpractice and then the doctor will tell me. Well, where are the anesthesiology records. This is a surgical procedure they had to give him anesthesia because he couldn't be awake during the surgery right so then I have to go back and get the records and fight with them like it literally, it can take a year or longer for me to get all the records.
And get them summarized and then have them reviewed by a doctor. Sometimes, I must have the records reviewed by multiple doctors before we get a final opinion and that's you know due to the expense, the complexity, and the steps we need to take before we even can file a lawsuit. You have to talk to a lawyer right away if you're a loved one's been involved in a medical malpractice situation, if you come to a lawyer with three months left on the deadline, there is no way a lawyer is going to take the case because we don't know the names of all the people were supposed to be suing.
You Need To File Before The Deadline
We only discover additional names of people to sue after we do a thorough file review. So, if you bring a medical malpractice case to a lawyer with just a couple of months before the deadline, the lawyer doesn't have time to do thorough research, to get a report, and to find out all the people who are or might be responsible.
I understand you don't want to have to hire a lawyer or file a lawsuit or cause a problem for anybody, but you have to protect your rights. Because insurance companies defend all injury cases and insurance companies are not nice. They're not like you and me, they are not interested in being fair, they're not reasonable, they care about one thing: collecting premiums and denying claims, and that's it. That's just the way this works. Literally, I probably talked to, at least a dozen people a year with a medical malpractice case, but they wait, and they bring it to me so late that I have to tell them I can't help them because I literally cannot get the work done that needs to be done before the deadline.
Now, if you need a lawyer, or you need somebody who might need a lawyer, please refer them to me you can always call. You can reach out to me if you have any question, give me a call 312-500-4500.
