Nursing Home Abuse Lawsuits Expected To Spike In Next 10 Years

Nursing home abuse may become the biggest area of litigation in the next ten years. It’s an absolute growing area because of the fact that the population itself is growing. There’s not enough quality nursing homes and there are many nursing homes that are just simply in it for the financial gain. That’s a horrible recipe for the future and will unfortunately lead to a lot of litigation.

Medical Malpractice Nursing Home Abuse Lawsuits

When your loved one has been injured do to the negligence of a healthcare provider, you may be able receive compensation for those injuries by filing a medical malpractice lawsuit. According to medical malpractice lawyers who handle nursing home abuse lawsuits, there are two important factors in terms of litigating and representing people in malpractice cases – expense and experience.

• Expense. It’s very expensive for a lawyer to litigate nursing home abuse lawsuits. Often times they’ll need to hire four, five, six, seven, eight or nine medical experts, other doctors or nurses or specialists who will come and review the records and give opinions on whether the care was proper or improper. It's very expensive to hire most of these people to do that. The lawyer has to pay those people up front. Luckily, med mal attorneys are paid on a contingency fee basis, so clients don't need to worry about those costs – only that the attorney can front them.
• Experience. A medical malpractice lawyer's experience is absolutely key when it comes to nursing home injury lawsuits because these are tough cases to litigate. Lawyers on the other side are typically the most experienced trial lawyers there are. In order to do this, you need to not only have experience, but you also have to have the respect in the community such that the insurance company and the lawyers on the other side know of you, have worked with you, have fought you in the past on other cases, respect that you are proceeding forward on legitimate cases and that you’re going to really battle as hard as anyone possibly could on behalf of your client.

  In addition to experience, one of the biggest issues in all these cases is deciphering the medical records and what they mean. Not only are they words that you don’t see in the general public very often, but there’s often lots of abbreviations that you need to know exactly what the situation is. Good firms actually have a physician and a nurse on their staff that are involved and review all of these cases.

Paying Medical Malpractice Lawyers Medical malpractice attorneys in most states are compensated on what’s called a contingency basis – meaning lawyers are entitled to recover a portion, or percentage, of what you recover from the case. This is a great system because it allows everyone to access to the court system. You do not have to pay a medical malpractice lawyer an hourly rate to represent you. Most people simply couldn’t afford that.

Under this system, the lawyer is only compensated if he prevails on your behalf and recovers damages for you. If he does, then at the beginning of your case, you typically agree to a percentage of what that ultimate number is as compensation for the lawyer.