When you interview prospective clients, consider that the medical-legal action, be it medical malpractice, personal injury, product liability, toxic tort, overdose or whatever, often begins prior to the alleged negligence. Whatever type of treatment, procedure, therapy or operation caused injury to your Client, the case really begins prior to that point in time. For example, was the medical treatment, procedure, operation, etc, truly indicated? Did the patient have sufficient conservative therapy as well as less dangerous alternative care? Was the patient truly informed of these alternatives?
The defense will usually contend that the complication was a "known risk" of the procedure, and their Experts will claim that the complication could happen in the "best of hands." But if the questioned care never took place because conservative measures were more appropriate, then the complication would not have occurred. The less urgent an operation, the more opportunity there is for conservative therapy which is usually a less dangerous forms of care.
For example, if a patient had periodic vaginal bleeding and was urged to have a hysterectomy without first employing hormonal therapy or a dilatation and curettage, and if postoperatively the patient developed significant complications such as hemorrhage, leakage from the bladder or a damaged kidney because of a suture around a ureter, she would have a stronger case than if those complications occurred from the same procedure deemed a life saving or cancer eradicating necessity.
If the patient was pressured into having a procedure where your Experts could present the alternatives in a rational way to the jury, then it is not just about some "unpreventable" or "preventable" complication. It is about misrepresentation and undue pressure to undergo an invasive procedure. That every juror can relate to.
