Medical malpractice

Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals are required to meet an accepted standard of care: the treatment a reasonably careful, similarly licensed provider would have given under the same circumstances. When a provider falls short of that standard and a patient is harmed, the law allows the patient, or the patient’s family, to recover.

The firm has represented patients and families in claims involving misdiagnosis, surgical error, anesthesia mistakes, birth injury, pharmacy malpractice, and substandard care. The attorneys work with treating physicians and independent medical experts to determine whether the standard of care was met and, where it wasn’t, to build the record a malpractice claim requires.

Care in a nursing home or other residential facility can raise a malpractice claim, an ordinary-negligence claim about how the facility was run, or both. The firm handles those cases; see nursing home abuse.

Initial consultation is free. Personal injury matters are handled on a contingency basis: you owe no attorney fee unless we recover for you.

Medical malpractice has been part of this firm since it was founded. Richard C. Mitchell, who co-founded the predecessor firm Mitchell & Shapiro LLP in 1997 and is now Of Counsel, built and carried the medical malpractice practice here for many years, and he has held Martindale-Hubbell’s AV Preeminent rating for twenty consecutive years. He remains a reference for the attorneys handling these cases today.

That continuity matters in malpractice work more than in most areas. These are expensive, expert-heavy cases with a short list of defense firms and repeat expert witnesses, and knowing how a particular hospital system or insurer litigates is knowledge that accumulates over decades rather than over cases. See Mr. Mitchell’s profile.

Failure to diagnose a serious or life-threatening condition is among the most common bases for a medical malpractice claim. These cases arise when a doctor, physician’s assistant, or nurse practitioner fails to recognize signs and symptoms that should have led to a diagnosis, or diagnoses the wrong condition (a cancer, a stroke, a heart attack, a spinal abscess, or a serious infection), resulting in the wrong treatment or none at all.

Not every misdiagnosis supports a claim. Sometimes a mistake doesn’t change the outcome, or the disease was already too advanced to treat. A claim requires showing that a provider fell short of the accepted standard of care and that the shortfall caused a serious, preventable harm.

All surgery carries some inherent risk, but patients are entitled to a surgeon, anesthesiologist, and surgical team that meets the standard of care. Common surgical errors include:

• Procedures performed on the wrong patient or the wrong site
• Instruments left inside the patient’s body
• Transfusions using the wrong blood type
• Infections caused by unsanitary technique

Substandard care extends beyond the operating room: medication mistakes, improperly administered anesthesia, and delayed post-operative response are all forms of the same underlying failure: care that did not meet the standard the patient was owed.

Anesthesia carries real risk, and an error can cause brain injury, organ failure, or death. Claims we have handled include:

A birth injury can affect a family for a lifetime. Cerebral palsy, permanent impairment to a child’s muscle control, can result from a failure to respond to signs of fetal distress or to deliver by cesarean when the signs called for it. Shoulder dystocia, where an infant’s shoulder becomes caught during delivery, can cause lasting nerve damage to the arm or shoulder when the delivery team does not use the techniques the emergency calls for.

No settlement changes what a family has been through. It can, however, fund the care a child with a birth injury will need for the rest of their life.

Pharmacists compound and dispense medication and counsel patients on how to take it safely. A misfilled prescription can be deadly. Claims the firm has handled include:

• Dispensing the wrong medication or the wrong dose
• Errors in compounding a medication
• Failure to counsel a patient on risks, side effects, or drug interactions
• Inadequate supervision of pharmacy technicians

People in jails and prisons cannot choose a doctor, fill a prescription, or drive themselves to an emergency room. When the medical care in a custodial setting fails, the person harmed had no alternative to it, and the failure is often the jail’s system rather than one clinician’s error: no intake screening, a chronic condition left untreated, a medical emergency met with a delay measured in hours.

These cases usually are not malpractice claims. Denying or ignoring a serious medical need in custody violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and the claim is brought under Section 1983 against the officials and the private companies that jails contract with for medical care. The standard is higher than negligence: it asks whether those responsible were deliberately indifferent to a known risk, not merely careless. A single case can carry both, a constitutional claim against the jail and a professional-negligence claim against the provider, and the two are proved differently.

This is where our medical work and our prison and jail conditions practice meet, and it is the part of this practice MSGF is best known for.

See all results →

A malpractice claim requires showing that a provider’s care fell below what a reasonably careful, similarly licensed peer would have done in the same circumstances. “Gross negligence” describes conduct reckless enough to be obvious even without medical training: a surgeon amputating the wrong limb, or leaving an instrument inside a patient.

Patients are also entitled to informed consent: plain-language information about a diagnosis, the treatment options, the risks of each, and the likely outcome, sufficient to make their own decision about their care. A signed consent form does not, by itself, release a provider from liability for negligence.

Georgia requires an expert affidavit to accompany most malpractice complaints, so we work with qualified experts before filing, not after.

See all results →