Healthcare and the law: a view from the bar

When a patient's care becomes the subject of medical-legal litigation, those from healthcare involved in the case may not understand the decisions of the lawyers and the final judgment of the judge. An appreciation of how legal professionals review healthcare decisions requires an understanding of the process that courts follow in analyzing medical cases and arriving at their own legal judgments. The concept of "medical evidence" can also be problematic. Since lawyers and judges are not medically trained, how lawyers present their evidence and how judges or juries review and understand that evidence can have an enormous impact on the outcome of litigation. This article outlines the types of evidence. When a medical event is reviewed in isolation in a non-medical setting - such as a courtroom - there are obvious problems with omission of the larger contextual background. In this paper, an actual legal case is reviewed, serving as an example of how such problems may be handled. There are factors other than those pertaining to the immediate medical case that have a role in shaping the medical judgment, including other ongoing events, changing medical standards and a reliance on outside resources.