When Should You Talk to an Attorney?
Something terrible has happened. Someone has died.
When the surviving family members or loved ones seek explanations from the healthcare providers in attendance, the explanations are generally inadequate, if any given at all. You begin with a suspicion that this tragic medical event was avoidable; it’s a suspicion that’s unpleasant to live with.
The mere fact that a person talks to a lawyer doesn’t require the lawyer or the client to do anything. It doesn’t mean that a malpractice or wrongful death claim is going to be filed or that an extensive investigation is going to commence. It just eliminates the lingering doubt and troubling questions some of us at some point in our lives, and the lives of our families have to come to grips with - deaths which are avoidable.
When we believe that the death in question is a matter of fate, it’s quite different than if we believe that it was preventable. It doesn’t matter how little medical knowledge the grieving family members had at the time of the incident, they persuade themselves in time that they should have known something was wrong. They then live with this terrible guilt.
One advantage of going to a lawyer in such circumstances is to find out what the truth is, and the benefit of this is not just to the family, but to society at large.
When we identify unsafe medical practices in the course of an investigation, it becomes far less likely that they will be repeated. In a way, an injury suffered by a victim, death or otherwise if serious, can be the basis for protecting others in the future. Somehow, the tragedy becomes a memorial to the victim because of the benefits enjoyed by all those that come after.
It prevents the death or injury from being trivialized or seeming meaningless.
Nobody would voluntarily incur such harms, particularly for their children in order to protect others in the future. But since the harm has already been suffered, some act in such a way so as to give some meaning to the crisis and tragedy so that something good comes from it?
And in the case of the victims who have to live with their disabilities, the economic challenges that such people face are enormous, and there are not resources to deal with those challenges outside of the judicial system.
There are a wide range of emotions. One common emotion is anger. This emotion is one that we take quite seriously because we feel that part of our job as lawyers is to eliminate anger. Anger doesn’t solve problems, plus the emotional consequences to a victim of being angry, thinking something was preventable but they lacked the power to do it, the anger that results from that just consumes the self. One can’t really get rid of it. You can’t throw it at anyone, so you’re stuck with it. And the anger isn’t helpful at all. Instead, we try here to deal with solving problems, not satisfying vendettas. Helping people make whole their lives again is the most important function we can perform.
