Knoxville Medical Malpractice Law Firm
MEDICAL MALPRACTICE
Medical injuries can forever change your life and the lives of your loved ones. They can cause not only physical and mental suffering but can also lead to lost earnings and even force a career change if you can no longer perform your job. Medical injuries can occur anywhere medical treatment is provided including in the hospital, at a physician’s office, at a pharmacy, or in a nursing home. When this happens, you may have a claim for malpractice. One of the first steps if you have been injured is for you to obtain a complete legal copy of your entire medical record from each healthcare provider.
In Tennessee, a medical malpractice claim is now known as a health care liability action, and such actions are controlled by the Tennessee Healthcare Liability Act. The person injured by medical treatment must prove the recognized standard of acceptable professional practice that applies to the healthcare provider or hospital who caused injury in the community in which the provider practices or in a medical community that is shown to be similar to the provider’s community at the time the injury occurred. You must prove that the healthcare provider failed to live up to that standard or failed to act with ordinary and reasonable care in accordance with the standard, and that you were injured due to the healthcare providers negligent act or failure to act within the standard of care. You must prove that injury would not have occurred had the provider met the standard of care. Only a qualified physician is considered competent to testify to each of these elements. The fact that you suffered an injury during medical treatment is not enough to win a case, and the jury will be instructed that injury alone does not equal negligence of a healthcare provider.
Before you can even get started in a medical malpractice case, you must have a licensed physician willing to sign a statement saying that the healthcare provider who caused injury violated the standard of care. As you can imagine, finding a Tennessee doctor willing to say another doctor violated the standard of care is extremely difficult. Therefore, we ordinarily must find experts from surrounding states which touch Tennessee, since the legislature requires that physicians testifying in a healthcare liability case must be from Tennessee or a contiguous bordering state and that the physician expert actually treated patients in that state in the year preceding your injury.
Statute Of Limitations
If you are considering filing a healthcare liability claim, you must keep in mind that in Tennessee, you typically only have one year from the date you knew or should have known of the malpractice within which to send notice of a potential claim. There are strict requirements for sending notice of a claim, so it is wise to consult with an experienced attorney who knows how to properly provide notice to a potential defendant or else your claim may be dismissed before you even get started. At Torres Law Firm, we have greater than 20 years of experience in pursuing such claims.
Significant Injury
While all healthcare liability claims are subject to the same proof requirements, the reality is that healthcare liability claims are very expensive to pursue and often take years to complete. Such claims often require the input of multiple experts and years of discovery. Healthcare claims are not like a typical car collision claim where liability is often not in dispute. Costs frequently run into thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars, so we must always evaluate if the degree of injury will lead a jury to return an amount sufficient to justify the costs. Damages that are likely to continue into the future such as future medical care and lost earnings are not subject to any sort of cap on damages, but damages for pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, and other non-economic damages are capped at $750,000.
If you have been seriously injured by a healthcare provider, we would be happy to speak with you to see if we can assist. Any consultation is completely free of charge.
All Personal Injury and Medical Malpractice Consultations at the Torres Law Firm PLLC are Free of Charge.
All the personal injury cases are taken on a contingency fee basis. Meaning that we only get paid if you get paid. Our contingency fee is generally a standard 33% of what we recover on your behalf.
The Torres Law Firm PLLC also handles workers compensation cases arising out of serious work injuries only. The standard attorney compensation on workers compensation cases is a standard 20% contingency fee.