When you hire a professional to perform an important service for you, whether it is health care or legal work, you expect that professional to utilize the experience, education, and training necessary to perform those services properly. When a professional fails to do so, the damages can be catastrophic.

We handle a variety of claims of medical and professional negligence on behalf of our clients.

Medical claims, in particular, require not only attorney expertise, but also staff expertise and familiarity with the experts who are necessary to evaluate and present a case. Since this firm began, the firm has litigated, settled, and tried numerous medical and legal malpractice claims with significant damages. Medical claims have included such tragedies as: birth injuries, paraplegia, and death. These cases are hard fought and expensive for a law firm to pursue. A law firm must be willing to devote the resources necessary to maximize the chance that a jury will get all of the evidence that it needs to find in the victim’s favor.

The medical insurance lobby has been very successful over the years in painting a picture of a “medical malpractice crisis” which simply does not exist. Medical insurers have raised premiums to cover their investment losses, not because of malpractice cases. Indeed, multiple studies have shown that even when the number of medical malpractice cases filed goes down, doctors’ premiums do not follow.

The terrible result of the insurance lobby’s efforts, however, has been to put into law protections for doctors in malpractice cases which do not exist for any other person. For example, before a medical malpractice case can be pursued, an injured party, or the survivors of someone who died as a result of that malpractice, must retain experts who agree to review and testify to the malpractice. A jury will never get to know that finding courageous doctors to testify is made even more difficult by medical malpractice insurance policies which forbid a doctor to testify against another doctor—regardless of the consequences.

Unfortunately, the health care providers and hospitals also have control of the records, and we have had multiple experiences with altered records, particularly now that most records are kept electronically. Juries understandably depend on the medical records for most of the facts in the case, and a jury’s ability to find the truth is often hampered by medical records which are not complete or which may have been altered.

Nevertheless, by knowing this field and aggressively pursuing those claims which should be pursued on behalf of our clients, we have been able to reach numerous good results and verdicts. In fact, one of our psychiatric malpractice cases was the single highest civil jury verdict in all of Arizona in 2005. See Verdicts and Settlements.

We don’t believe our own profession should be immune from the law, either, and have handled many legal malpractice cases where, for whatever reason, a lawyer does not meet the standard of care. Such cases may involve expired statutes of limitation, failure to file security agreements, or other negligence which causes a client damages. Our lawyers have also been involved in bringing other lawyers to justice who have crossed the line into committing acts against their clients which are not simply negligent.