Connecticut Personal Injury Firm Describes the Benefits of Having a Medical Professional on Staff

Hey, Paul McCollum from the doctor lawyer team where we talk a little bit about continuing the conversation and what makes our firm different from other law firms. And we're here with Dr. Mike Our in house. So medical doctor, I'm not just a medical doctor, but a neurosurgeon, Mike, what's what makes a medical malpractice case? You know, how do we prove a case?

So medical malpractice claim is like any other injury claim where there's a tort toward means that someone that due to their negligence has caused harm to another person more or less. So in a medical case, specifically, Doctor has a duty to care to, which is the first part of the tour, obviously, hospital, a doctor, any health care provider that's providing you care as the duty to, to maintain the standard of care expected of a person who practices that are that specialty, say a neurosurgeon. So if they do something that's below that standard, and the standard is decided by another practitioner in that field, which is called an expert, if what they did wrong caused you damages, which are the harms that we claim and try to make that into money, because there's no other way to make you whole other than money, the only thing our system has those things are all proven something below the standard of care that causes you harm. That's a medical malpractice claim.

And how does being a doctor into your medical background help us deliver results for our clients?

Well, in all injury cases, right, there's injuries. And being a doctor, I can look at the injuries that have that have occurred, sometimes ones are even overlooked by other doctors. And each of the injuries are possibly compensable damages to the client, and then it goes in front of the mediator or insurance adjuster or even a judge in a jury. I'm well suited to explain to them how the accident caused these damages.

Now, earlier, you referenced this specialty care providers, for example, like a cardiologist, what do you mean by that? Like can you give our our potential clients and listeners an idea what you mean?

Sure, most people have different types of doctors, different specialists in different fields. So if you have a medical malpractice claim against a cardiologist, the expert who has to decide whether or not something was done below the standard of care of another cardiologist has to be a cardiologist, a Board Certified cardiologist

can't just be any doctor can't just be anybody. And your experience, you know, what types of experts to look for?

Correct. Some of them were friends of mine, and some of them are professional colleagues that I and I were both through medicine and also from the practice of law in this area.

And I know medicine, like the law, there's so much specialization these days, like in law, there's divorce attorneys and personal injury attorneys. There's corporate attorneys trust in the States, that is the same thing in medicine, essentially. Right? That's correct. And and there's even some specialties, if you will, like pediatricians, there might be even sub specialties with for neonatal care and the like, is that right? That's correct. And then I think you referenced you have a number of contacts and all types of different practice areas from your years of

practice, correct. And that's essential for a medical malpractice firm. Because finding experts is often the most difficult part of cases, getting the expert to answer the phone, explain to the expert, more or less what you need from him, putting words into his mouth, but you're explaining to him how he needs to explain it. If he thinks there's something that was done wrong, that caused a person damages. And in fact, sometimes you need another expert, one that talks about what was done by a doctor that caused damages. But you often need another person who can explain the damages that are in his field. So for instance, a cardiologist doesn't diagnosed a person having a heart attack, and the person has lack of oxygen to their brain because the heart has stopped for a while. Sometimes you need a neurologist to come in and explain. Here's the damages to the brain that occurred because of the lack of oxygen. So in other words, the neurologist didn't do anything wrong, but he can explain this is what happened because of the negligence of the cardiologist.

Let's talk about other types of cases. So you know, we had a lot of car accidents and motorcycle accidents slip and falls and like how was your medical background help with those types of cases?

Again, because I know what the damages are, I can explain them better to the decision makers who are the people who are going to pay the harms client, I can show them say an MRI, some part of the body and say see here you This is what this act did. This is what this car accident did do this person or this is what falling down from that scaffold did to this guy. So if it's already been shown that the person did not meet the standard of care, person driving a car or a regular construction company that put up scaffolds, then I can show why that caused all these harms. And I can explain the harms fairly easily to lay people or to judges adjusters, whatever the decision maker is,

the decision makers might be if we're on behalf of our clients deal with the representatives of an insurance company, correct.

Sometimes it might just be an insurance adjuster, or sometimes it could be even some in house medical person that they have a lot of these companies, excuse me often have nurses, things like that. And then from there, you have mediators, judges, and of course, juries, all the way at the end if you go all the way to court.

And I think the other thing we found is just by having you in house, it really speeds the process for our clients in terms of evaluation, whether it's medical malpractice and or personal injury, just evaluating the damage, you know whether or not there's damages, and we can review to bring a case in the first place fair to say

yes, sometimes probably most of the time, I can tell over the phone with just a small amount of information. The first thing I usually ask people is, in your words, what do you think was done wrong? And that'll point me in the direction in any medical records that they have where to look. And I can usually give them an answer pretty quickly whether or not we need to continue investigating. And it just gets deeper and deeper. If there looks like there was actual potential recovery for it.

Great. So anyway, hope you found this video helpful diving into some of the things that we see on a day to day basis. And we're happy to talk to you about anything that you have this particular to your life. Thank you.