Tampa Personal Injury Lawyers / Tampa Medical Malpractice Lawyers

Tampa Medical Malpractice Lawyers

If you were injured by the hands of a medical professional, you might be worried about how you are going to pay your bills and provide for your family. The Tampa Medical Malpractice Lawyers at Morgenstern & Herd fight to hold the guilty parties accountable and get the compensation you deserve.

Tampa Medical Malpractice LawyersHealthcare professionals must follow established standards of care when treating patients.  These standards are in place for the safety of all patients.  Medical malpractice is the failure of a healthcare professional to meet the standard of good medical practice.

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We are skilled Tampa Medical Malpractice Lawyers who know what to do when a healthcare worker fails to meet the standards of good medical practice.  Holding medical providers accountable for mistakes can help raise the bar on healthcare performance, resulting in improved reliability and care.

Medical malpractice lawsuits are often complex.  Morgenstern & Herd, PLLC represents clients and loved ones who have been injured or lost their life as a result of medical negligence in Florida.

Fighting for Victim Compensation

Attorney Betsey Herd offers the benefits of her knowledge and experience in the healthcare management field along with her years practicing as a medical malpractice lawyer.  Attorney Betsey Herd fights to help you recover financial compensation for you or your loved one’s injury or loss of life.

Legal remedies include:

  • Monetary damages for future medical care and treatment
  • Lost wages
  • Lost future earnings
  • Pain and suffering
  • Funeral costs

When Florida Healthcare Professionals Fail Us

Our Tampa Medical Malpractice Lawyers are skilled in handling medical malpractice cases where injury results from:

  • Failure to diagnose
  • Misdiagnosis
  • Failure to obtain an accurate medical history
  • Failure to order appropriate tests
  • Failure to assess the patient’s condition
  • Improper training or supervision
  • Improper administering of medicine
  • Failure to maintain cleanliness of medical premises
  • Surgical mistakes or errors
  • Anesthesia errors
  • Birth injuries
  • Brain damage or permanent injuries to newborns
  • Injury or death of mother
  • Failure to intervene in a timely fashion
  • Incorrect application of a procedure

Frequently Asked Questions About Medical Malpractice:

How Can I File a Medical Malpractice Claim in Florida?
  • In the State of Florida, you can’t jump right away into filing a medical malpractice suit. You have to go through a pre-suit process, during which time your attorney will gather all relevant medical records and send these to an expert for independent review. This expert will provide an affidavit, which your attorney will send via certified mail to the medical provider. That medical provider will have 90 days to consult with an attorney and malpractice carrier, and at the end of that period must either admit or deny the claim. If the medical provider denies your claim, your attorney will file a lawsuit.
How Should I Choose a Medical Malpractice Attorney?
  • Experience matters most. You aren’t just looking for an attorney with plenty of court time and peer recommendations, either, though these things are important. Generally, an attorney with some medical background will be more successful in Florida medical malpractice cases. All this information is available online, but you shouldn’t stop there. Remember that you may spend years working with this person. You should meet face-to-face before deciding. You need someone you can trust, someone you’re comfortable talking to, someone who won’t bully you into a course of action you don’t want to take, and, ideally, someone you like.
What Will a Medical Malpractice Case Cost Me?
  • Most law firms will not charge you for a consultation, and will often take on the costs of obtaining your medical records and hiring an independent medical expert for you. There will be no cost for an evaluation and investigation, even if the attorney finds you cannot proceed. (But be sure to ask about this – not all attorneys have the same policy.) Most Tampa Medical Malpractice Lawyers use contingency fees, taking a percentage of the award or settlement. (That means that if you lose at trial, you won’t have to pay your attorney anything.)
How Long Will a Medical Malpractice Case Last?
  • In Florida, the pre-suit process adds a 90-day waiting period before a case can even go to trial. Medical malpractice is one of the more frequently litigated areas of law, which means the courts are backed up. One case could take two to three years if mistakes or acts of negligence are well-documented or obvious, or to five to six years in cases that require deposition of experts from around the country, and conflicting evidence or testimony.
How are Damages Determined?
  • If you’ve been a victim of medical malpractice, you and your family need compensation. The complexity of malpractice cases require significant research and testimony from expert witnesses, all of whom must be paid. You can’t pay them out-of-pocket because you’re already struggling. This money has to come from your reward. Because of that, your damages have to rise to a certain level, so you can pay your attorney and expert witnesses and still have compensation left over. As such, it is not generally worth your time to pursue a claim for a minor injury.
What Damages are Needed to Bring a Successful Surgical Claim Forward?
  • The cost of medical malpractice cases are very high. If in the end a patient gets all better as a result of a mistake that has occurred, then it’s likely that the cost of those medical experts will exceed in a recoverable damages. The damages that are necessary in the state of Florida are catastrophic, long term, permanent damages.
Does a Heart Attack or Stroke Equate to Medical Error?
  • Having a heart attack or having a stroke does not equate with medical malpractice unless there is a delay in recognizing the signs and symptoms that you have exhibited and reported to your medical provider.  If you have been complaining about dizziness, sweating, pain in your heart after a meal without exertion, then that should be known to your medical provider.
How Can a Medical Malpractice Case be Won?
  • To win your case, you need to do more than document substandard care. Substandard care per se does not cause damages. You need to prove causation – in other words, that the documented substandard care directly caused physical and/or emotional damages. In general, you also have to demonstrate catastrophic, long term, or permanent damages. If you recover before too far into your suit – and suits will, again, last years – you may only get enough in recoverable damages to pay your attorney and the expert witnesses you hired.
How does Morgenstern & Herd Get Paid in a Medical Malpractice Suite?
  • Medical malpractice fees are taken out of any recovery from the wrong doer. Those are called the contingent fee contract. If we don’t get recovery for you we don’t get paid even if we spend money on medical experts in your case.
Is it Medical Malpractice if an ER Doctor Fails to Diagnose My Condition?
  • The answer to that question is that the standard of care that applies to an emergency provider is different than to your doctor who knows more about you. It is an emergency medical provider’s obligation to treat emergency medical conditions. You may often leave the emergency room without a diagnosis and be given instructions to return to your medical provider. An emergency medical provider may not diagnose you, and doesn’t have that obligation, he only has the obligation to diagnose and treat emergency type conditions.
What is Causation Aspect of a Case?
  • You have to have not only substandard care in a medical malpractice case, but that substandard care doesn’t cause damages.  Causation means that the substandard care or the mistake, also results in damages.
Anesthesia Awareness
  • Anesthesia awareness is a known phenomenon. It occurring does not mean that a medical provider has rendered care below the standard of care.  However, if you have anesthesia awareness and the provider becomes aware of it during the surgical procedure and does not respond, then that is a deviation from the standard of care and you should contact an experienced medical malpractice lawyer.
Will the Doctor Lose Their License if Found Negligent?
  • We do have a law in Florida where physicians can lose their license as a result of three strikes. What constitutes a strike is not necessarily admitting to medical error.  What happens in your medical malpractice case is that your physician will be reported to the department of health at the time the complaint is filed.  The department of health does not discipline or sanction the physician for the alleged medical error but rather for documenting errors. It’s unlikely that a physician is going to lose his license for one medical error.

Tampa Medical Malpractice Lawyers Fighting For You

If you or a loved one has been injured through negligence by a healthcare provider, contact Morgenstern & Herd, PLLC in Florida today to arrange a free initial consultation and preliminary case review.  Our lawyers handle all personal injury and wrongful death cases on a contingent fee basis.

Contact our experienced Tampa Medical Malpractice Lawyers to fight for you and your family against the negligence of healthcare workers.

Attorney Betsey Herd is a partner with Morgenstern & Herd, PLLC  and has achieved the highest rating of 10 on Avvo.