When to Speak to a Lawyer

When should a person seek an attorney in a medical malpractice case?

Someone has suffered an unexpected and serious injury as the result of a medical procedure, or worse…someone has died. You begin with a suspicion that something has gone wrong with the medical or surgical procedure, and, it’s a suspicion that’s unpleasant to live with.

Speaking with an attorney doesn’t mean that a case is going to be filed or that extensive investigation is going to commence. It merely eliminates the lingering doubt and questions surrounding disabilities and death which are unavoidable.

When we believe they are a matter of fate, it’s quite different than if we believe that it was preventable, because the first thing that happens with a loving family member is if they believe that an event was preventable, they suddenly believe it was their fault that it wasn’t. It doesn’t matter how little medical knowledge they had at the time, they persuade themselves in time that they should have known; they then live with this terrible guilt.

One advantage of going to a lawyer in such circumstances is to find out what the truth is, and the benefit of this is not just to the family, but to society at large. When we identify unsafe medical practices in the course of an investigation, it becomes far less likely that they will be repeated.

A medical injury suffered by a victim can be the basis for protecting others in the future. The tragedy becomes a memorial to the victim because of the service the investigations of the legal claims have done for all those that come after. It prevents the death or injury from being trivialized or seeming meaningless. Not that anyone would voluntarily incur such harms, particularly for their children in order to protect others in the future. But since the harm has already been suffered, why not act in such a way so as to give some meaning to the crisis and tragedy so that some good comes from it?

In the case of the victims who have to live with their disabilities, the economic challenges that such people face are enormous, and there are not resources to deal with those challenges outside of the judicial system.