Like the typical personal injury lawyer, the attorney that specializes in medical malpractice cases asks each client to pay a contingency fee.
What is a contingency fee?
That is a portion of the compensation that the lawyer’s client receives upon winning the case. Some lawyers set a fixed contingency fee; others use a sliding fee. A sliding fee increases, if the case proceeds from the negotiations to the pre-trial stages. It could increase even further, if the case progressed to the point of a trial.
How large is the contingency fee?
The size of that fee gets determined by the lawyer-client team. Most Injury Lawyer in Richmond Hill request about 33% of the client’s compensation. A few medical malpractice lawyers charge an hourly fee. In that case, the client normally has to pay a retainer fee, as well, just before the case gets underway.
A client must also cover a hired attorney’s expenses.
Sometimes an attorney includes the cost of the expenses in a retainer. In other instances, the client gets called upon to pay the expenses as they arise. Finally, there are some lawyers that deduct the expenses from the settlement, along with the contingency fee.
Which of the lawyer’s duties create the added expenses?
A lawyer might need to pay for the copy of a given document. The court’s filing fee gets paid by the client’s lawyer. In addition, lawyers need to find and hire the experts that testify at a trial.
What sort of information does an attorney pay for, when hiring an expert, someone to testify at a trial?
If that expert has specialized in a certain branch of medicine, then he or she can explain to the jury the appropriate level of care that should be delivered to a patient with the sort of problem that requires the skills of a specialist.
After explaining the appropriate level of care, the expert/specialist should go on to contrast the expected level of care with the nature of the care that was given to the patient/plaintiff. That contrast, if done properly, should help to strengthen the plaintiff’s case.
The final element of the testimony from the expert/specialist usually highlights the expert’s specialized knowledge. That element focuses on any harm that was done to the patient/plaintiff, while under the care of the defendant/doctor. The expert’s specialized knowledge should allow him or her to offer details on the exact nature of that harm.
For instance, he or she could review exactly how the doctor’s actions managed to harm the patient/plaintiff. In addition, he or she could point to the symptoms that proved the existence of a medical problem, one of the sort that had been mentioned earlier, in the expert’s testimony.