Suffering from a personal injury can be a life-altering event causing physical pain, emotional distress, and financial burden to your client. For such cases, seeking appropriate experts becomes crucial to ensuring you have the ammunition needed to properly represent your case.
Your experts not only educate the insurance company about the client’s diagnosis, functional impairments, and future care needs, but they also paint a picture of how these impairments affect the client’s life. Therefore, deciding which medical-legal expert to entrust your personal injury case with, is not to be taken lightly.
The Complexities of Personal Injury Cases:
While there are many expert medical professionals out there, not all possess the expertise and experience necessary to navigate the complexities of personal injury cases.
Personal injury cases encompass a wide range of incidents including car accidents, slip-and-fall, medical malpractice, and workplace injuries. Each case is unique, involving intricate legal and medical aspects that require careful analysis and attention. Amateur “experts”, or Life Care Planners who specialize in Senior Care rather than Personal Injury, lack the knowledge to fully understand the nuances of case management, establishing causation, quantification of impairments, and determining future care needs. Their inexperience risks critical errors that often jeopardize the chances of receiving fair compensation for your client.
Navigating What Expert to Hire:
Navigating the sea of possible medical-legal experts can be a daunting task. After all, you are entrusting this expert to make potential life-altering opinions regarding your client’s impairments and future care. Therefore, it is imperative to choose wisely.
An amateur expert might struggle to meet deadlines, miss important documents, or mishandle future care considerations for your client due to their lack of experience or understanding of the full extent of your client’s impairment.
In contrast, a seasoned and professional medical-legal expert with years of experience has a deep understanding of the legal landscape, ensuring that every step is executed efficiently and effectively.
Doctor life care planners work within their respective scope of practice allowing them to perform specialized examinations on the client as well as fully analyze the client’s medical records. This supports the doctor life care planner’s authority to opine not only their current care, future care, and future costs, but also how those three elements coexist with the client’s impairments and disabilities and affect the client’s life. A doctor life care planner can also help streamline the damages report process and improve the likelihood of a settlement being procured in mediation as opposed to trial.
Trial Experience:
While many personal injury cases are settled out of court, some do proceed to trial. In such instances, having an experienced medical-legal expert by your side, with a track record for winning on the stand can make a world of difference. Amateur experts struggle to present a compelling opinion and lack the courtroom presence and advocacy skills needed to properly educate and sway a judge or jury. On the contrary, skilled medical-legal experts are well-versed in courtroom dynamics, and their expertise can help tip the scales in your clients’ favor.
When choosing a doctor life care planner, consider one that has decades of experience treating the types of patients and impairments that your client is suffering from to support their credibility on the stand. After all, it’s not the question of if the authored Life Care Plan can hold up in court, but rather the question of if the one who authored the plan can hold up in court.
Conclusion:
When faced with a personal injury, the decision to seek the appropriate medical-legal expert should be backed by careful research and consideration. While amateurs might offer lower fees, the potential risks and consequences of entrusting your case to them far outweigh any initial savings. Personal injury cases demand a level of expertise, experience, and dedication that only seasoned professionals can provide. By partnering with an established medical-legal expert, you can rest assured that your case is in capable hands, increasing your chances of receiving the compensation your client rightfully deserves.
—
Dr. Brad Poppie has over 20 years of personal injury experience providing care as a treating doctor, coordinating rehabilitative case management, and expert trial testimony services. If you have a client that you would like to discuss their need for an expert report, please contact me directly at 720-982-2000 or email me at: brad@injuryreportingconsultants.com.
