A medical malpractice claim involves several different elements. The first is, is that you have a provider who you have a relationship with and they breach that relationship. They owe you a duty to treat you within a standard  what we call the standard of care. And that, again, is a spectrum of decisions that they can make, but they need to treat you within that standard. If they treat you below that standard, then they have, what we call, breached their duty.

Then the other element that we need to show is that that breach of duty caused you, as the patient or our client, significant permanent residual damage. So that means kind of life altering, significant changes. Now you can’t walk or now you have significant  you can’t do your activities of daily living on your own, things like that, pretty significant.

Significant residual damage means something different to everybody, so I think it’s good to find out, just call to inquire. After we prove that or we look at that and see that that happened, the next thing that we have to do is we have to hire an expert and that expert is a medical professional who looks at the records, looks at the care, whether it’s nursing care, hospital care, clinic care, whatever kind of care it is and it’s somebody that is in the similar position.

So if it’s a nurse, we hire a nurse with the same background that looks at the claim and has to be able to give his or her opinions to a reasonable degree of medical certainty. That doesn’t mean that you say, Well, it’s a possibility that this happened, or Yeah, it logically makes sense that that could happen. It has to be much stronger than that. They have to say within the practice of what I do, it’s to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, this wasn’t done appropriately and this cased the damage.

So you have to hire an expert. Now each case is different. You can hire – I’ve had cases where I have one expert. I have cases where I’ve had six experts. So it just depends on the case on how many experts that you need just depending on the complexity of the case. Then after you have an expert support on there, then you can go ahead and do what we call file a lawsuit. We are not – in the State of Minnesota, we have to have that expert onboard and giving their opinions to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that they support the case before we even put the case into suit.

So the judicial system doesn’t allow any medical malpractice claim to get put into suit. So if somebody thinks that they were treated improperly, but there’s no medical support, they can’t get that case into the judicial system, which is helpful. So there’s a lot of steps we have to do before we even essentially, what I call get to the gate to take it forward.