Q: Looking for medical malpractice attorney.

A: It is highly unlikely this asker will find a med-mal attorney without first obtaining a medical report from an independent physician asserting to malpractice committed by the asker's doctor. The New York standard to prove a med-mal case is the asker's physician deviated or departed from accepted community standards of practice, and that such departure was a proximate cause of the asker's injuries. The asker alone cannot prove such a departure on his say-so and on his paperwork. Lawyers are not doctors to understand the asker's paperwork. Judges are not supposed to make conclusions on paperwork because judges are not doctors.

Another factor is that after Obamacare's enactment, more and more med-mal cases are being dismissed by judges. The philosophy is that tort cases are driving up medical costs, and such cases must be limited or eliminated. It is nowadays not uncommon for a judge to allow the plaintiff to engage in lengthy discovery only to be hit with a motion for summary judgment which the judge grants in favor of the doctor. No one can ever say all such cases must be dismissed, but the reality is that lengthy proceedings ending up in a dismissal mask the policy to limit or eliminate med-mal actions. The pool of plaintiffs is never the wiser.

Lifting away the threat of a tort award has many benefits for the doctor. He can prescribe medications that carry with them disastrous results for which the doctor does not need to answer. Opioid addictions can happen freely as judges dismiss cases against these doctors. There is also a teen suicide/homicide pandemic taking place. What if a psychiatrist prescribes a drug that send a child off to shoot up a school or go jump off a building? The doctor is never on the hook, and the court's order of dismissal is protection for the doctor to keep prescribing and prescribing. What if the news media helps mask the fault of the doctor and the dignity of the judge by running new articles about how Congress is deadlocked on "gun control?" Isn't it clever: mask a fault by invoking another fault?

Lawyers are very sensitive to exposure to court trouble. A law school education averages a quarter million dollars in debt from any tier school coupled with a bizarre bar examination that takes separate, expensive and lengthy preparation. The law license is the anvil over the lawyer's head not to go against government policy. A lawyer takes his investment in his law license into his hands every time he sues a protected entity like a physician. Any case can turn into a grievance for any ginned up reason to send the lawyer a message that his case is untenable. None of this is to say that med-mal cases do not happen and are not successful. Appellate Divisions routinely overturn dismissals and remand cases back for trials. However, the risk does not fall away, and it takes years to prosecute an appeal and get a result, good or bad.

Lastly, we are not a lawyer referral service. We answer questions about the law meaning to educate and inform askers. Lawyers here are not searching for clients, and we do not offer legal advice on specific cases. The asker must search online or in his community for a law office and retain an attorney (and a doctor who wants to challenge another doctor) who are both not afraid to take on the apparatus. Most often, clients choose lawyers for all the wrong reasons like experience in cases. Having med-mal experience is only half the capacity of a lawyer: facing danger and risk is the other half.