Where can parents turn when their infants are injured at birth? The costs of caring for a baby with a birth injury can be astronomical. You may be worried if you could have prevented it. Our birth injuries attorneys in Chicago can find out if it really was the fault of your medical team.
Medical professionals make mistakes more often than you think. If they caused your child’s birth injury, you can sue for compensation through a medical malpractice lawsuit. Our birth injury attorneys can help your family get answers and pursue a lawsuit against the people who harmed your baby.
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What Are Birth Injuries?
Birth injuries are injuries to babies and mothers that happen prior to birth, during birth, or just afterward. They’re completely at the mercy of medical professionals during this critical phase of life. Competent doctors and nurses take great care to protect them against the many things that can go wrong.
However, some of them act negligently and put babies and mothers at risk for serious injuries or death. If this negligence causes harm, you may have a medical malpractice case. Our birth injury attorneys in Illinois and across the country help victims discover if there was malpractice.
Malpractice cases aren’t like other personal injury claims. Filing a claim on your own with your provider’s malpractice insurer is a recipe for disaster. Your claim will get denied or you’ll get far less than you deserve unless you have the help of a lawyer to fight back.
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Legal Requirements to Win a Medical Malpractice Lawsuit in Chicago
Four things are required to sue a medical professional for malpractice successfully. When we’re investigating a claim, we’re looking for evidence to prove them. The four things are:
A Medical Relationship
There must be a medical relationship between your baby and the defendant (who you’re suing). There may be multiple defendants. In many birth injury cases, you’ll sue both a medical professional and the hospital that employs them. Finding all the responsible parties means more routes to compensation.
A Breach of the Standards of Care
How do you know if a doctor harms someone when there are so many things that can go wrong during medical treatment? Given our mortality, death and injury aren’t avoidable. Yet medical science has built up a body of treatment knowledge and best practices. These are called standards of care.
A doctor who breaks the standards of care set by other medical professionals is negligent. For example, a fetus needs to have a monitor connected during birth to track its vital signs. If they forgot to connect it or ignored warning signs from it, that’s a breach of the standards.
Causation of Injury
A breach may put you and your baby at risk, but it may not cause injury. We also must connect the breach to the injury. Sometimes this connection is direct, like a nurse dropping a baby on the floor, but it can also be indirect.
Damages
Damages are the consequences of the injury that you want to get paid for. These included medical expenses for your baby, pain and suffering payments, and much more. Parents usually come to a Chicago birth injury lawyer when their health insurance will no longer cover the costs, or if the injury is so severe that they want to hold someone accountable.
If we can prove all four things, then you have a valid case. To prove it, you must have a lawyer experienced in the kind of case you have to maximize your chances of success. The insurers know they might have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, after a birth injury, so they will try to fight back.
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How does a Birth Injury Lawyer Help Me?
Hiring a birth injury lawyer gives you many advantages when fighting insurers for compensation. It levels the playing field because our lawyers can take the insurers to court. A judge and jury may make them pay far more than they wish to pay, so they’re more willing to negotiate.
Lawyers also know how the law applies to your case and how to prove your claims that your baby was harmed through malpractice. Through our investigative skills and our network of medical experts, we will discover if someone breached the standards of care and harmed your baby.
We also give clients legal advice on how to protect themselves and their babies from insurance tactics that could put their compensation at risk. If an insurer has reached out to you with a settlement offer, do not accept it without speaking to our lawyers first. It’s a near certainty that it’s less than what you should receive.
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Illinois Laws on Medical Malpractice Claims for Children
There are three laws you need to know about when you start a medical malpractice claim involving children in Chicago. The first is the deadline to start your case, called the statute of limitations. For children harmed under 18 years of age, you have until their 8th birthday to file. Mothers who are harmed must sue within two years of the injury or its discovery, and no more than four years since the injury happened.
The second is Illinois’ affidavit of merit requirement for cases. Before we can sue, we must speak with a qualified health care professional about what happened. They must vouch that you have a case for malpractice before the court will accept the lawsuit.
Finally, Illinois has no caps on medical malpractice cases. Some states limit how much compensation victims can get from malpractice cases. Illinois used to have limits, but they were struck down in 2010 as unconstitutional. So if a jury awards you more than you expected, you don’t have to worry about the state limiting how much you receive.
Hire a Birth Injury Attorney in Chicago Today
Your baby has suffered enough. Find out if your child’s injury is eligible for a medical malpractice claim and get payment to help with their care. Contact the Birth Injury Lawyers Group to speak with an experienced birth injury attorney in Chicago right away.
All our attorneys work on contingency, so you will owe no money unless we win your case for you. So there is no risk for you to get a free consultation. Call or email our office to schedule your consultation. Your baby’s future depends on it.
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