Becoming a Medical Legal Consultant

Becoming a Medical Legal Consultant

As a nurse, you’re an expert in medical terminology and understanding diagnoses. While you might have pictured your skills keeping you bedside, there are other fields that could use your knowledge and expertise. Legal medical consultants are often used by lawyers to help in malpractice cases. If you’re interested in overlapping your career with the legal field and becoming a medical malpractice expert, here are a few things you should know.

What Is a Medical Legal Consultant?

During a medical malpractice suit, there’s bound to be a plethora of medical terminology. Many professionals, including judges and lawyers, don’t understand the jargon and terms used to diagnose or treat patients. Because of this, a translator is needed who understands the medical side of things. A medical legal consultant is a professional nurse who is also qualified to work as a legal consultant. Many medical legal consultants are currently employed as nurses or worked as a nurse in the past.

This medical/legal crossover position is relatively new. Created during the 1980s, these valuable individuals are used to bridge the gap between legal professionals and field of medicine during a malpractice suit. While they may have received their education in the nursing field, they have also been trained in relevant legal matters.

What Does a Medical-Legal Consultant Do?

Medical-legal consultants are useful in many different capacities. Typically, they join forces with law professionals to help complete services throughout a trial. They may help to decipher the medical terminology used in torts, insurance fraud, and personal injury cases.

The main responsibility of a medical-legal consultant is to gather and study information that’s pertinent to a medical case. These often include medical records and statements. The consultant may be responsible for reviewing medical records and comparing them to specific allegations made by one of the parties involved in the lawsuit. These consultants can also determine whether or not medical charts display signs of tampering or malpractice.

In some cases, medical-legal consultants may also be in charge of locating and interviewing witnesses for cases. Along with finding witnesses, medical-legal consultants may act as expert witnesses themselves.

Where Do Medical Legal Consultants Work?

There are numerous places for medical-legal consultants to find employment. Hospitals, clinics, long-term patient care centers, and health insurance companies all hire medical-legal consultants to assist them through legal matters. Law firms and forensics departments can also benefit from retaining the services of these medical consultants.

How to Become a Medical-Legal Consultant

Most medical-legal consultants first become registered nurses. This degree usually comes from a nursing school or university. Once they’ve achieved a license, it’s beneficial to have a few years of working experience before becoming a legal consultant. There are also various certification courses available to help nurses get the qualifications needed to become medical-legal consultants. Many of these courses require a certain number of working hours before you’re able to take the courses.

There’s a great need for medical-legal consultants in many different fields. Whether you’re already an RN or just starting school, setting your sights on medical legal consulting is an aspiration that will pay off in the long run.

How to Work with Medical Legal Consultants

Particular legal cases, such as medical malpractice suits, can benefit from partnering with a medical-legal consultant to help make your case. Medical-legal consulting services are meant to be an objective source of knowledge to help you illustrate a point about the medical industry with an insider’s view. Here’s how to make the most of partnering with them in your case.

Understand Their Purpose

It helps to understand the true purpose of a medical legal consultant. They are available to help as expert witnesses, but they can also provide you detailed insights into how the medical system is meant to operate. They can help you organize medical records and the chronology of your narrative—what it was and what it should have been, according to medical practices. These experts can help you build your case with facts and insights, but their job is to be objective.

Recognize What the Standard of Care Is

In a negligence case, the issue at hand is how a patient’s care was provided versus standard procedure. That’s the heart of how a legal case can be built on behalf of your client. Let your medical legal consultant provide you the insights and construct that timeline to help you build a clear case.

Make Distinctions Between Types of Injuries

It is important to clarify what injuries are a result of a previous incident, and what were caused by the current malpractice scenario. This will help make your case stronger. It removes any ambiguity and prevents the opposing side from using those details against you.

Medical legal consulting services exist to help you build the strongest case that you can, to help ensure that your client gets the defense that they deserve. Finding the right consultant can help you establish a beneficial partnership for all of your medically related cases in the future.

What You Need to Know about Legal Medical Consultants

As an attorney or as a medical professional, you work hard to always do right by your clients and patients. Legal medical consultants can often help a great deal if you are involved in a personal injury or medical malpractice lawsuit. However, if you have never hired one before, you might not know what they do or whether it’s right for you. In either case, read on for some basic information about these professionals and how they can benefit you.

Professionals Will Review Your Case

Legal medical consultants are not just medical professionals, they are legal consultants that have a lot of experience testifying in court cases. They can review cases to determine whether litigation is the best course of action or not. This means that before you get involved in trial preparations, you could save some money by hiring a professional to review your case and help you decide whether taking the matter to trial will be worth it in the end.

They Have a Proven System

When there are proven systems in place, the whole process will go a lot smoother. When you hire legal medical consultants hand-selected by Reliable Clinical Experts to help you, you will benefit from years of experience and a proven system to help you and your clients navigate the case at hand. Although the details of the process will vary by case, here is a basic outline of what you can expect:

• Free Consultation: A free consultation is offered to help determine the proper expert consultant for your case (does a surgical case need a surgical expert, an anesthetic expert, or both?).
• Board-certified specialist review: A board-certified specialist or specialists will review the case to determine if it is true malpractice.
• Written report: The specialist will provide a written report or discuss the results of their review with you.
• Court testimony: The legal medical consultant who initially reviews your case will be the same one who follows your case to conclusion and provides court testimony if needed.

Importance of Working With the Right Experts

Finally, it is very important to ensure that the medical-legal consulting firm you choose follows the strategy outlined above. At Reliable Clinical Experts, we’ve been using this strategy to work with our clients to win verdicts for over a decade.  We are looking forward to hearing from you so we can help you too.<