Injury Insight Podcast

Takeaways

• Calling a knowledgeable lawyer is the first step in pursuing a medical malpractice lawsuit.
• The interview process involves answering detailed questions about medical care and history.
• Gathering medical records can be challenging, but it is crucial for the case.
• An in-depth analysis of the records is conducted to determine the viability of the case.
• Expert support is required before filing a medical malpractice claim.

Chapters

• 00:00 The Importance of Calling a Knowledgeable Lawyer
• 02:21 The Detailed Interview Process
• 04:14 Challenges in Gathering Medical Records
• 05:36 In-Depth Analysis of Medical Records
• 06:35 Obtaining Expert Support for the Case
• 07:03 Filing the Medical Malpractice Case

Transcript

(00:01.422)
Welcome to Injury Insight, the podcast that unravels the stories behind personal injury and medical malpractice lawsuits, examines the science behind the claims, and spotlights the fight for justice in the healthcare system. Your host for the podcast is Mike Duffy, a practicing attorney with over 25 years of experience.

(00:51.704)
So today’s topic is what are the five steps that take place before a lawsuit, a medical malpractice lawsuit, is brought. It’s a complex issue, as you might imagine, because medicine by its very nature is complex. The most important thing you can do, step number one, is to call a lawyer who knows what they’re doing. If you think you’ve been the victim of malpractice, call Duffy and Duffy and let us go through the process that makes a determination as to whether there is a lawsuit or not.

It is impossible for any lawyer to tell you on the telephone or in an initial interview process that you have a case or don’t have a case. Medical malpractice is, I indicated, is extremely complex. Every single client that walks in the door has had a medical issue. That’s why they’ve been involved in the medical community in the first place. They show up to a medical provider with some underlying condition.

whether it’s an injury or a disease process or some unknown issue causing some symptoms or whatever it may be. There’s always something underlying and a malpractice lawyer needs to be able to determine what is nature’s responsibility and what is a doctor’s responsibility. So the first step is to call a knowledgeable lawyer who actually handles medical malpractice cases on a daily basis. The second step

is the interview process itself. You would either on the telephone or on a Zoom call or in person sit down and talk to the team at a law firm to determine the various issues associated with the malpractice case. You are going to be asked a lot of questions and you may not understand at all why these questions are being asked. The questions may have to do with your medical care.

You may be showing up because something happened on a Thursday and you’d like to discuss what happened on that Thursday. But to the lawyer, what happened two years before Thursday might be important. Or what happened two weeks after Thursday might be important. Everything is a part and parcel of the claim. All of your injuries, all of your pre -existing medical history, everything interacts with everything in medicine.

(03:16.01)
And because of that, a lawyer who knows what they’re doing will ask a lot of questions. A firm such as ours, you would interact with a nurse in an early phase of the investigation so that that nurse can document all the medical issues and ask all the medical questions that will then feed into the lawyer’s analysis of the case. That interview process can take the better part of an hour if done correctly.

After the interview itself, you’ll be asked to either sign papers or you’ll be told that it’s not something that the lawyer can help you with. Once you’ve signed the papers, a retainer, you have hired the lawyer and the lawyer has to start doing their job. Step three is gathering the medical records. Gathering records sounds very easy, sounds very simple, but doctors and hospitals routinely make it extremely challenging to get your records.

They do not want the lawyers looking at your records. We’ve had instances where medical providers change their records after they have found out that a lawyer is involved or in many instances after they have found out that they harmed someone and before a lawyer is involved. So we would encourage you to get your medical records as soon as possible even if you haven’t spoken to a lawyer. But the lawyer’s job is going to be to get the full set of records

in an initial part of the case. You may say to the lawyer, my records are available on a portal. Not all of the records are available on a portal. Hospitals, and usually it’s hospitals, put up only certain parts of the record in a portal. They’re not going to be complete. As I’ve indicated, everything interacts with everything in medicine. So we are not able to make determinations

In almost any instance, based on what’s on the portal, we’re going to have to get the full record. We might have to go to court and force the hospital to give us the record. You may have to get involved in helping us get the record. There’s a lot of different ways to set it as they say, skin the cat. In the end, our job is to get the record. Step four is an in -depth analysis of your medical records by the lawyers at Duffy and Duffy.

(05:36.312)
Some law firms who claim they do medical malpractice will just bundle up the records and ship them off to a medical provider and whatever that medical provider says is what they will tell you. That’s not what we do. We do an in -depth analysis of your records, making determinations from a legal and medical standpoint as to whether you have a case that can survive in court or not. If you just rely on the medical provider, you’re limiting the determination and the analysis to that one opinion.

In a firm such as ours, we have 17 or 18 lawyers at this point. Most, if not all, of our lawyers will review all of the cases together, and you’ll get the benefit of those 17 or 18 minds and experience of those 17 or 18 minds making a determination as to whether you have a case or not. If we think there is a case, step five, we go and we speak to an expert, and we garner expert support for your case. In New York, we are required

to have expert medical expert support for your case before we are permitted ethically to file a claim. If we cannot get an expert to support the case, we cannot bring the case, even if we’re sure we’re right. Doesn’t matter. The law is very clear and requires an expert support. All of those five steps bring us to the final issue, which is filing your case. Once we have completed the five steps, we can determine whether we file a case or not.

and we let you know what we think is going to happen with the case.

This podcast is for entertainment and educational information only. Nothing said here should be construed as constituting legal advice, nor does it imply any relationship between the listener and Duffy and Duffy law. If you have any questions about a personal injury or medical malpractice issue you are facing and want to see if you have a case, please contact Duffy and Duffy to schedule a confidential consultation. You can call us at 516 -259 -3775.

(07:37.76)
or email Mike Duffy at mduffy@duffyduffylaw.com and we’ll get back to you quickly.