We hear that comment once or twice a week. It is almost always related to someone looking to file an Illinois medical malpractice lawsuit. Hopefully we can shed some light on how these cases work.
Malpractice cases are time intensive, very expensive and often involve review of tens of thousands of pages of medical records. To put a case together takes around six months of time and you must have an expert willing to testify that they have reviewed all of the medical records and believe that negligence occurred.
Getting to trial can cost between $50,000 to $150,000 or more. In Cook County, the most plaintiff friendly county in Illinois, patients win approximately 20% of cases that go to trial. In some downstate counties they haven’t had a successful med mal case in years. Put another way, your chances of winning the case are about as good as a pitcher getting a hit in baseball.
Most people that call about a possible malpractice lawsuit had one of two things happen to them: 1. The doctor was incredibly rude and lacked compassion, but didn’t cause any harm; or 2. The doctor was negligent and put the patient in a harmful situation that could have killed them. They might have made a one hour surgery take four hours or possibly caused someone who should have missed no time from work to miss two months and suffer needlessly during that time.
We can’t help people who have suffered some harm that could have killed them or would have left them permanently injured had another physician not caught things in time or luck not played a role. It’s not "ok that you almost died" it’s that the system is not set up to compensate people with this problem nor is it set up to punish doctors and hospitals that make these mistakes. In theory you should be able to file a complaint with the Illinois Department of Professional Regulations when a doctor screws up and they should be able to discipline that physician. But the reality is that organization is way overworked and hardly ever takes action against the license of a medical professional for mistakes that are made.
Put another way, an Illinois malpractice attorney is not going to spend $100,000.00 of their own money to win a case that if successful is going to be worth $200,000.00. Especially when you consider all of the time it takes and the likelihood that at trial they will lose.
This is hard for people who have been wronged to understand; but if you take the emotion out of it and look at it as an economic decision it will become clearer why it can be so hard to find an attorney if you don’t have a catastrophic result with good evidence of malpractice.
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business does this then it violates the TCPA ("Telephone Consumer Protection Act"). TCPA is a Federal Law that provides for damages any time this happens.
Raise your hand if you want to spend your day in court? Not us either and we are attorneys. It’s especially no fun to be in court if you are being sued by someone.
Back when Michael Jordan was leading the Bulls to six championships, even when they were the best team in the league, they always won way more games at home than on the road. The year that they won a record 72 games and lost only 10, nine of those losses were away from Chicago. Even when they have been mediocre the number of home wins has always been more than road wins. Why is that? It’s because home court advantage matters.
Or so says the Illinois Appellate Court. In a recent decision the Court essentially ruled that if you have a treadmill in your house and kids are over playing, it is your job to supervise them and to make sure that they don’t get hurt.