Areas of Practice

Maryland Medical Malpractice Lawyer

When you seek treatment from a doctor, nurse, dentist or other health care provider, you expect them to provide high-quality care to help cure your condition or at least help you better manage your symptoms. Unfortunately, many medical professionals do not provide the level of care their patients are entitled, causing new injuries or worsening their existing illness.

If you think a medical professional caused you an injury by providing inadequate care, you may be entitled to compensation through a medical malpractice lawsuit. The Maryland medical malpractice lawyers at The Law Offices of Peter T. Nicholl are fully prepared to handle the complexities of a medical malpractice case, from applying relevant laws to consulting medical experts and valuing your damages.

There is no upfront fee to work with our attorneys. We will evaluate your potential lawsuit in a free, no obligation legal consultation and determine if we think it is in your best interest to file a claim. If we take your case, you will not have any fees or costs unless you recover fair compensation.

Complete a Free Case Evaluation form right away or call 410-244-7005.

What Forms of Compensation Could I Recover?

Our Maryland medical malpractice lawyers can pursue many forms of compensation to help you recover from all the ways your injury or worsening health has affected your life. These forms of compensation are divided into two categories, economic and non-economic compensation:

Economic Compensation

This category covers the out-of-pocket expenses caused by your injury, some of which include:

Medical Expenses

This covers past, current and future medical treatment that was made necessary by your health care provider’s malpractice. This could include compensation for the following medical bills:

  • Surgeries and other medical procedures
  • Prescription drugs
  • Physical therapy
  • Medical equipment, such as a wheelchair or crutches
  • Medical testing, including blood work and x-rays
  • Trips in an ambulance
  • Transportation to doctors’ appointments
  • Stays in the hospital

Lost Income

In many cases, the victim’s injuries prevent him or her from going to work for a period of time. Injuries can also cause you to miss work while you are going to appointments or receiving treatment. Our attorneys may be able to pursue compensation for all wages lost as a result of your injuries.

Diminished Earning Capacity

Your injury could leave you permanently disabled or unable to return to your job in the same capacity as before. In some cases, you may need to get a job with another employer or in a different field because of your injury.

Our Maryland medical malpractice lawyers can pursue compensation for your injury’s effect on your future earning capacity. This can help you continue to support yourself and your family with your new physical limitations.

Non-Economic Compensation

These are forms of compensation without a specific monetary value attached and can include:

Pain and Suffering

This is meant to cover the emotional issues and physical discomfort you experience because of your injury. Emotional issues could include:

  • Anxiety
  • Stress
  • Depression
  • Anger

These issues can make it difficult to continue living the life you did before your injury, hurting your quality of life.

Physical Impairment or Disfigurement

If your injury causes you to have a permanent disability or disfigurement, it can have a severely negative impact on your quality of life. This is difficult to quantify, which is why it is a good idea to work with an experienced medical malpractice attorney in Maryland.

Loss of Consortium

This is also referred to as loss of companionship, and it is meant to compensate victims for the effect of their injury on their relationship with their spouse. For instance, the injury could cause a loss of affection between both spouses or hurt their ability to have a sexual relationship.

Non-economic compensation is an important part of an injury victim’s compensation. This is why it is so important to work with a trusted attorney on your claim who knows how to conduct a thorough investigation to help accurately value these damages.

Contact a Maryland medical malpractice attorney right away.

How a Maryland Medical Malpractice Lawyer Can Help You

While there is no law stating that you must work with an attorney on your medical malpractice case, you should strongly consider it because of how complex and time-consuming these cases can be. Managing a case on your own can be particularly difficult when dealing with an injury or severe medical condition or disease.

There are many ways a medical malpractice attorney in Maryland can assist you with a medical malpractice case, allowing you to focus on receiving treatment for your injury.

Managing Your Entire Case

Once we take your case, you can count on our experienced medical malpractice lawyers in Maryland to manage every aspect of the legal process with great care and professionalism.

We can investigate all of the relevant aspects of your case, including your injury, the facility where you received treatment, health care professionals who treated you and the effect of your condition on your life.

We will review:

  • Medical records from before and after your injury
  • Any past complaints against the facility or medical professional who treated you
  • All bills and receipts for treatment related to your injury
  • Accounts of your treatment from eyewitnesses

Filing All Necessary Documents

Under Maryland Code Annotated Courts and Judicial Proceeding Section 3-2A-04 (b)(4), within 90 days of filing your complaint, we are required to provide a statement from a qualified medical expert that you were a victim of medical malpractice.

We can find a qualified expert to review your case and make a determination about whether medical malpractice occurred. We know how to ensure the expert fits Maryland requirements that he or she make less than 20 percent of his or her income from working on personal injury claims.

Deciding Whether to Waive Arbitration

Maryland law also states that claims must go through arbitration before proceeding to court. Arbitration is a process where a third party meets with the two parties to attempt to come to a resolution of the complaint.

However, the law allows either side to waive arbitration at any time after providing a statement from a qualified expert.

Our trusted medical malpractice lawyers in Maryland can carefully review your situation to determine if it makes sense to go through arbitration or waive it.

These are just some of the many ways an attorney from our firm can assist you throughout the legal process as he or she pursues all of the compensation you deserve.

Fill out a Free Case Evaluation form today or call 410-244-7005.

Types of Medical Malpractice We Handle

We take cases involving many different kinds of medical malpractice, such as:

Surgical Malpractice

This is one of the most common forms of medical malpractice and it involves errors and other oversights during surgical procedures, such as:

  • Leaving surgical tools inside patients
  • Lack of cleanliness leading to dangerous infections
  • Operating on the wrong body part
  • Causing internal damage to organs or blood vessels due to carelessness
  • Performing surgery without a plan
  • Failing to monitor vital signs when a patient is under anesthesia
  • Failing to properly intubate a patient when he or she is under anesthesia
  • Giving a patient too high a dose of anesthesia

Misdiagnosis/Failure to Diagnose

This includes:

  • Making an incorrect diagnosis
  • Failing to diagnose an illness, such as cancer
  • Taking too long to diagnose an illness, which hurts a patient’s prospects for recovery
  • Incorrect analysis of test results, leading to an incorrect diagnosis or failure to diagnose

Medication Errors

These are errors causing injuries that occur in the prescription or administering of medications, including:

  • Prescribing the wrong medication
  • Prescribing a medication that has harmful interactions with other medications the patient is taking
  • Administering the wrong dosage of a medication
  • Prescribing a drug for a condition not listed on the label

Failing to Obtain Informed Consent

This means that a medical professional operated or provided treatment without fully explaining the procedure and the risks so he or she would know about any of the inherent risks or dangers. Patients have a right to be an informed participant in their own health care decisions.

If you have been a victim of these or any other forms of medical malpractice, contact our medical malpractice attorneys in Maryland today for a free, no obligation legal consultation to determine your legal options. We are committed to building a strong case to try to hold the liable parties accountable and obtain the compensation you deserve.

Contact a Maryland medical malpractice attorney today by calling 410-244-7005.

Who Can Be Held Liable for Medical Malpractice?

Some of the parties that could potentially be held liable for the medical malpractice you suffered include:

  • Doctors
  • Nurses
  • Hospitals
  • Out-patient facilities
  • Paramedics
  • Pharmacists
  • Walk-in clinics
  • Psychologists and psychiatrists
  • Dentists
  • Nurse aides
  • Hospital staff members

If we take your case, we will carefully review all relevant factors to determine all of the parties that are responsible for your injuries so we can attempt to hold them accountable.

Fill out a Free Case Evaluation form today.

Proving a Medical Malpractice Claim

Establishing that a doctor or other health care professional made a mistake is not enough to prove medical malpractice occurred. You must prove the five elements of a medical malpractice claim:

Doctor-Patient Relationship

This is usually very easy to establish, all it means is that you received treatment from a doctor or agreed to receive treatment from a doctor.

Duty of Care

The duty of care is created once a medical professional provides treatment or agrees to do so. The duty of care is a legal standard for providing care. The medical professional is required to provide treatment that meets accepted standards in the medical community, taking into account his area of practice and expertise.

Another way of saying this is that medical professionals are legally obligated to provide the same type of care that another medical professional with similar training and qualifications in a similar situation.

A qualified medical expert will help us establish what the duty of care was for the situation when malpractice occurred.

Duty of Care Was Breached

In other words, the medical professional(s) you are filing a lawsuit against failed to uphold the established duty of care for your situation. Sometimes a duty of care is breached due to the actions of a medical professional and other times it is due to the inaction of a medical professional.

Breach of Duty of Care Was Linked to Your Injuries

This can be one of the most difficult things to prove in a medical malpractice claim. It is particularly difficult in cases where we allege a medical professional caused an infection or failed to diagnose a condition when he or she should have.

We will conduct a thorough investigation to help collect the evidence needed to show that your injuries were caused by malpractice, and not your actions or a preexisting medical issue.

You Have Damages

One of the most important things our Maryland medical malpractice lawyers will do is attempt to determine all of the damages you suffered. This will require medical records, receipts, employment records, your personal account of the effects of your injuries and many other pieces of evidence.

We have an in-depth understanding of how to prove medical malpractice due to our many years of combined experience with these cases.

Contact a Maryland medical malpractice attorney right now.

Maryland Laws That Affect Your Claim

Maryland has a few laws that affect medical malpractice claims, including:

Statute of Limitations

This is a deadline for filing a medical malpractice claim and if you miss the deadline, you will not be able to file a lawsuit.

Maryland’s statute of limitations for medical malpractice claims is five years from the date the injury occurred or three years from when the injury was discovered, whichever date is sooner.

This allows for situations where the victim was not immediately aware that he or she had suffered an injury when it first happened. This often happens in misdiagnosis cases, where the victim does not realize the misdiagnosis until after it happens. In these situations, the victim will have three years from the date he or she discovered the injury. However, if the five-year deadline comes up sooner, the claim will be barred by the statute of limitations.

Damage Caps

Maryland places a cap on non-economic damages in all personal injury claims, including medical malpractice claims. The cap was set at $500,000 in 1994 and his risen by $15,000 every year since then.

Our Maryland medical malpractice attorneys can help determine the current cap on non-economic damages for your claim.

Contributory Negligence

Unfortunately, Maryland has a contributory negligence law that could prevent you from recovering any compensation. Under this law, you are prohibited from recovering any compensation if you are in any way responsible for your injuries.

However, it is much more difficult to establish that the victim in a malpractice case was negligent. This is because the attorneys for the other side must show that the victim’s negligence occurred at the same time as the medical professional’s negligence.

Our medical malpractice lawyers in Maryland are committed to ensuring these laws are applied correctly to your case.

Schedule your free, no obligation legal consultation right away.

Contact Our Maryland Medical Malpractice Lawyers Right Away

Medical malpractice can have a devastating effect on your life, possibly even leading to your death. This is why you should contact an attorney if you believe you or a loved one was a victim of any form of medical malpractice.

The medical malpractice lawyers at our firm offer a free, no obligation legal consultation to discuss your claim. We take cases on contingency, which means we do not charge legal fees or costs unless our clients receive compensation.

Fill out a Free Case Evaluation form right now to determine your legal options.

Contact our personal injury lawyers for a free consultation if you have been injured by another’s negligence. You may be entitled to compensation.

GET WHAT YOU DESERVE

410-244-7005