When the clients come in, many clients are worried how are they going to win a case against a physician, it would be their word against the doctor.  And I basically reassure them that they play a very limited role in our evaluation of a malpractice case.

Many times the people we are representing are the widows or spouses of somebody who has died, therefore the person who is involved in the care and treatment is no longer with us.  Or we’re representing an infant who is born because of a physician’s malpractice or a woman who has had a diagnosis of breast cancer and the doctor missed it.

Well she doesn’t know why the doctor missed it, she doesn’t know what the doctor did wrong and what we basically tell them it’s the medical records created by the physicians that determine the malpractice.  We tell them we’re going to go out and get the records, the doctors’ records, the office records of the other treating physicians, hospital records, go through ever one of those records and we cross reference the physician’s notes to the nurse’s notes.  The nurses notes to the progress notes, the progress notes to the temperature charts.  And basically it is the physician’s own words what he has written down, his diagnosis and interpretation that leads us to the determination of malpractice.

The physician could have a diagnosis of diagnosis A but you look at the x ray films, you look at the interpretations by the radiologist and the interpretation was really something else and the physician missed it.  It’s the records that is the central part of any malpractice claim, and we try to reassure the client that it’s the records that will make the determination that there’s a case.  They are not going to bear the burden of the determination of win or loss simply based upon their testimony.