Personal Injury Lawyers

What should I know about birth injury cases for medical malpractice?

Despite advances in medicine, birth injuries remain a concern and affect infants all across the United States. The injuries can be lifelong and permanent for the child who will suffer for the rest of their lives. In other cases, for the infant to recover, extensive and costly treatment is necessary. If a settlement is offered by the at-fault party’s insurance company, it will likely be far less than the damages that the parents will suffer. Alternately, they may refuse to offer any settlement at all and claim that your child did not suffer a birth injury and that it is simply a birth defect. Talk to a medical malpractice attorney from our firm who focuses on birth injury cases. After a complimentary consultation, they can offer your family guidance as to what legal options are available to you and how you might best recover your damages.

What does “duty of care” mean?

For birth injury cases for medical malpractice to move forward through the judicial system and resolve in a win for the parents, the plaintiff’s attorney must prove that the defendant violated their duty of care. From a legal perspective, a physician owes their patient a duty to provide the same quality of care that any other capable physician would provide their patient under similar circumstances.

What is a breach of the duty of care?

When a physician falls short of the expectation to provide a duty of care, they have breached their duty of care. In the context of birth injury cases, a medical malpractice attorney must prove either that:

•         The physician performed an action that caused harm to the infant.
•         The physician did not perform a necessary action in order to prevent harm to the infant.

How long do birth injury cases for medical malpractice take to conclude?

Generally speaking, medical malpractice lawsuits take time and may last from months to years, depending on the case and the extent of damages. In light of this, our medical malpractice attorneys make every effort to settle cases out of court. In this way, our clients can recover their damages faster than if they must go through the time and ordeal of a trial. A settlement may also yield them more compensation because they will not have to pay court costs or nearly as much in attorneys’ fees. Another advantage to negotiating a settlement is that it produces a concrete result: a lump sum of compensation whereas a trail could result in no jury award to the plaintiff and instead, the plaintiff will likely be saddled with attorneys’ fees from both sides as well as court costs. This would be in addition to the damages they sustained from their child’s birth injury.