Medical Malpractice

About Kanner & Pintaluga’s Medical Malpractice Team

Our dedicated medical malpractice team is committed to fighting for victims of medical errors – such as misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, surgical errors, birth injuries, and more – get the justice they deserve. We have extensive experience representing personal injury and medical malpractice cases through settlement negotiations and litigation procedures, and have successfully represented clients in cases involving surgical errors, improper diagnoses, birth injuries, medication mistakes, and other types of medical malpractice.

We take an aggressive approach when it comes to holding medical facilities, organizations, and professionals accountable for their actions. We partner with some of the best medical experts, investigators, and strategists in the country to build strong cases that are aiming for maximum compensation — and we have the track record to prove it.

Our case history shows that our personalized legal support and aggressive approach to representation are a winning combination for our clients, and with no-risk representation — you won’t pay a dollar unless you win — it’s easy to see why we’re a great firm to partner with.

Why Choose Kanner & Pintaluga for Your Medical Malpractice Case?

When you’re up against a complicated medical malpractice case — especially while you’re trying to navigate the consequences of a malpractice injury or wrongful death — it’s essential that you have the support of an experienced law firm on your side. Kanner & Pintaluga is here to fight for your rights, taking the case head-on while you stay focused on recovery, healing, and moving past your experience.

Proven Results

When it comes to choosing our law firm, our results make it simple. We have a proven history of high-stakes medical malpractice cases, recovering millions for our clients. When it comes to medical malpractice, the liable party will resort to tactics meant to minimize or outright deny claims, but we’re ready to counter those tactics and fight for the maximum amount you are owed.

We Win or You Pay Nothing

Our firm operates on a contingency fee basis, meaning that you won’t pay a dollar if we don’t win. Financial barriers should never be a reason that people can’t partner with top-notch attorneys. When we win your case, we will be paid as an agreed-upon percentage of your award so you don’t need to think about paying for an attorney every month while your case is in process.

Expertise and Resources On Your Side

An excellent lawyer is a key component to a successful medical malpractice case, but they rely on the support of industry professionals. We have partnerships with leading medical experts who have in-depth understanding of things like medical procedures, healthcare regulations, and more. These experts provide us with testimony and guidance while we analyze your medical records and build an airtight case around the malpractice that caused you harm.

Steps to File a Medical Malpractice Claim

After a medical malpractice injury, it might feel like you need to rush to get it resolved. Don’t. Insurance companies and defense attorneys like to leverage this feeling of urgency to reach quick settlements that deny a victim what they are truly owed. Connect with an attorney right away, and then patiently focus on your recovery. Follow these steps to start working towards getting the money you deserve:

Schedule a Free Consultation With a Medical Malpractice Attorney

Your first step is to get an understanding of your case. A free consultation with an attorney helps determine if a medical professional breached their duty of care. From there, you can decide whether or not to work together, and they will get started on your case.

There are strict filing deadlines, known as a statute of limitations, that will vary depending on your filing state. While it may seem like there is plenty of time until that date arrives, your attorney will use this time to build a case and possibly seek a settlement, so getting legal representation as soon as possible is a good decision.

Gathering Evidence and Investigating the Case

Once you have an attorney, they will gather all of the documentation about your treatment and begin to review your medical records. These records include things like hospital logs, prescriptions, doctors notes, and more.

Your lawyer will also work with medical experts who will analyze the provider’s work and decide if and how they failed to meet the accepted standard of care. They will gather witness statements at the same time, speaking with nurses, staff, and other medical professionals who are associated with the case.

Throughout this process, your medical malpractice attorney will identify the liable party — or parties. This can include doctors, nurses, facilities, companies, and others. In some cases, your attorney may decide to seek damages from multiple liable parties.

Deciding Between a Settlement and Filing a Lawsuit

The majority of medical malpractice and other personal injury cases are settled out of court, but if they can’t get you the money you are truly owed, they will proceed to a trial. Settlements often lead to a quicker payout and avoid lengthy litigation, but trials may result in higher payouts. This is a decision that you and your attorney will make when it comes time for it.

Settlements are handled with a series of negotiations directly between the provider’s insurance company or defense team. Our team is expertly trained in getting strong settlements, but we’re ready to take it all the way.

Filing the Lawsuit

First, your attorney will draft a formal complaint that outlines the negligence and the damages you have suffered as a result. There are other specifics that may be required, like a pre-suit notice submitted to the healthcare provider and a sworn statement by a medical expert confirming that malpractice took place.

Discovery and Pre-Trial

In preparation for a trial, there will be depositions where attorneys on both sides question professionals, expert witnesses, and everyone else involved. Both parties will also exchange evidence in order to build their cases.

Once both parties have made their sides clear to the other, this is where insurance companies often offer a payout to avoid a trial.

Trial

If a settlement agreement is not reached, then attorneys will present their evidence and introduce expert testimony in trial. At the end, a judge or jury will issue a verdict that decides whether or not the provider is liable, and if they are, how much they must pay. In some instances, they may also decide that punitive damages are appropriate, which are designed to punish the liable party in addition to the compensatory damages they will also pay.

There are often appeals processes after the verdict if either party disagrees.

Receiving Compensation

Your compensation will cover your medical expenses, lost wages, and other damages like the pain and suffering you endured, as well as any long-term medical costs and other costs of ongoing care.

What is Considered Medical Malpractice?

Medical malpractice comes in many forms, but at the core are the questions of (1) whether or not the healthcare provider failed to meet the accepted standard of care and (2) whether the failure to meet the standard of care resulted in harm to the patient.

Just because there was a medical mistake doesn’t mean that it will either qualify as medical malpractice or that it’s a slam dunk case. We will need to prove that negligence was present, and will need evidence to support the improper care. Part of proving the negligence will question whether a competent professional in the same situation would have acted differently.

Elements of Medical Malpractice

There are four distinct, connected elements that must be proven for a medical malpractice to be successful:

1. Duty of Care: Did the healthcare provider have a responsibility to treat the patient with competence?
2. Breach of Duty: Did the healthcare provider fail to meet this duty of care?
3. Direct Harm: Did the breach of this duty directly cause harm to the patient?
4. Damages: Did the patient suffer from damages, whether physical, financial, or emotional?

Examples of Medical Malpractice

As you can imagine from the elements listed above, there are many different situations that can be determined to be medical malpractice:

• Surgical mistakes like operating on the wrong body part or leaving a medical instrument inside the patient.
• Misdiagnosis like failing to detect cancer, heart disease, or other issues in a timely manner.
• Medication errors like incorrect dosages, mixing dangerous drugs, or giving the wrong drug.
• Anesthesia errors like giving too much or too little anesthesia.
• Lack of informed consent, meaning that a medical professional performance a procedure without properly explaining the risks to the patient.

What Is NOT Medical Malpractice?

• Unavoidable complications like known risks for a procedure.
• Negative outcomes don’t necessarily mean that negligence occurred.
• Being unsatisfied by the outcome if proper care was given.
• Pre-existing conditions that worsen naturally or were not caused by negligence.

There are a lot of times where someone isn’t satisfied with the outcome of their medical treatment, or their condition worsens even while being correctly treated. This is considered a natural outcome in nearly all instances and will not lead to a successful case. Our initial consultation will help us explore this possibility and others.

Knowledge is Power

Many times, individuals find that insurance companies will start to frame their very real medical malpractice issue as a natural outcome to convince the harmed patient to revoke their claim or settle for a pittance. Settling comes along with bending legal documents that protect the insurer and their insured of any future legal action for the injury in question, whether or not the victim’s conditions worsen. Don’t talk to insurance companies without legal representation.

How Kanner & Pintaluga Proves Medical Malpractice Cases

A strong case is one that starts with extensive preparation from a diverse team that brings a lot of experience to the table. Here’s how it works:

Building Your Case

Medical malpractice cases are complicated, and a successful case requires substantial proof to overcome the insurance company’s aggressive defense. Kanner & Pintaluga’s legal team takes as much time as necessary to conduct our investigation, including interviews, combing through documents, and more.

Our goal throughout the investigation is to make it completely clear that your healthcare provider had a standard of care that they failed to meet, and that this failure caused direct harm.

Collecting Medical Records

Even if the case looks like an open-and-shut matter, a success is built on top of all of the evidence we can gather, starting with your medical records. We will gather things like hospital charts, test results, prescriptions, doctor’s notes, communications, and anything else that can help us piece it all together.

We compare things like your medical history and record of treatment, looking for any errors, inconsistencies, or miscommunications, and will also look to find any evidence that the doctor may have failed to diagnose, misdiagnosed, or failed to properly treat your condition.

Consulting Medical Experts

We work with some of the best medical professionals out there, who are specialized in the fields relevant to your issue. We take our record review to them, along with all of the documentation and evidence we’ve gathered, and they will review records and provide testimony in support of our findings and explaining the decisions a competent medical professional would make in the same instance.

Expert testimony is a key element of a medical malpractice case because of how complicated and nuanced these decisions can be. It’s important that we can validate the claim, leaving no room for reinterpretation, before we file a lawsuit.

Connecting Negligence and Harm

Even proving negligence isn’t enough to win a case: we need to prove that you suffered direct harm, whether that’s an injury, a health decline, long-term complications, or emotional suffering. We’ll use a broad mix of documentation and evidence to support this claim, like medical studies, case precedents, and the analysis from our experts for this step.

Calculating Damages

There are a lot of things that distinguish a criminal from a civil case, but one of the most prominent distinctions is that of damages. Simply put, damages are the actual measurable impacts that you have suffered — and are owed — as a result of the malpractice.

The most common damages are “compensatory damages,” which are designed to compensate you for these losses. Compensatory damages include:

• Medical expenses such as the cost of additional treatment, surgeries, rehabilitation, medication, and long-term care, to name a few.
• Lost wages and reduced earning capacity as a result of your injuries. This includes, but is not limited to, the wages you lost while unable to work, and any possible impacts to your future earning potential, as well as lost contributions to retirement or pension funds.
• Pain and suffering, like emotional distress, the actual physical pain you must endure, decreases your quality of life.

Calculating these damages requires a few different approaches. Things like lost wages and medical expenses require a combination of calculating existing losses and projecting future impacts, while putting a dollar to something as abstract and subjective as “pain and suffering” requires a different approach. These damages, known as non-economic damages due to the fact that there is not a set dollar amount for them, are the ones that insurers will most aggressively deny when dealing directly with a patient.

Negotiation or Litigation

Once we’ve built a rock-solid case and calculated your damages, we’ll take it to the hospital, insurance company, medical provider, or other at-fault party and demand a fair settlement. This is the start of an intense negotiation phase where we’ll work to deconstruct their typically lowball offer and counter with figures closer to the true damages you are owed.

If negotiations can’t get us to a favorable settlement amount, we’re ready to take your case to trial.

Our trial strategy involves presenting all of the evidence we’ve gathered, as well as performing cross-examinations with experts representing the defense, and convincing the judge and/or jury that you have suffered undue harm.

Types of Medical Malpractice Cases We Handle

As you understand after reading all of this information, no two medical malpractice cases are alike. That said, the following cases are some of the most common that we handle. Whether or not you see your situation listed below, contact us right away to connect with an experienced medical malpractice legal professional to learn about your options.

Surgical Errors

There are many different errors that can take place in relation to surgery, including:

• Operating on the wrong body part or wrong patient.
• Leaving surgical instruments inside the body.
• Unnecessary surgeries because of misdiagnosis

Misdiagnosis or Delayed Diagnosis

When you are seeking answers for a mounting problem, it is up to the medical professional to go through the correct steps to diagnose. Malpractice relating to this area of medicine include:

• Failing to diagnose a serious condition in time, causing you to suffer worsening outcomes.
  • Cancer
  • Heart Disease
  • Strokes
  • Infections

Birth Injuries

Mistakes before, during, or after childbirth can cause serious harm to the mother and/or child, like:

• Cerebral palsy
• Erb’s palsy
• Oxygen deprivation leading to brain damage
• Failure to perform a necessary C-section
• Misuse of forceps or vacuum extraction that causes birth trauma

Medication and Prescription Errors

Doctors and pharmacists are expected to consider all relevant factors when prescribing, and errors can include:

• Administering the wrong drug
• Prescribing the wrong dosage
• Overlooking dangerous drug interactions

Anesthesia Errors

Mistakes before or during anesthesia can cause major issues:

• Too much anesthesia causing brain damage or death
• Too little anesthesia causing the patient to wake up during surgery
• Failing to monitor vital signs during a complication

Hospital and Nursing Home Negligence

When you leave your loved one in a hospital or nursing home, you rely on the staff, nurses, and caregivers to act competently. Negligence includes:

• Failing to monitor post-surgical conditions
• Bedsores, falls, or malnutrition
• Improper discharge that leads to worsening conditions

Lack of Informed Consent

Doctors must explain the risks and alternatives before a treatment, and any failure to do so is malpractice. Examples of a lack of informed consent include, but are not limited to:

• Performing a procedure without informing the patient of possible complications

Not fully explaining possible alternatives to the treatment