Medical Malpractice Versus Legal Malpractice

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Medical malpractice and legal malpractice are two distinct subsets of malpractice. Both involve violated standards that led to harm, but each involves different settings. As the names imply, medical malpractice involves a healthcare professional or company causing significant injury to patients. Legal malpractice involves a legal professional or company causing negative legal outcomes or monetary loss for clients.

These make up the three primary components of a malpractice case: violations, negative outcomes, and damages. Here’s how it works:

1. Plaintiffs must prove that the defendant violated either the standard of care (in medical malpractice) or a standard of conduct (in legal malpractice)
2. They must then show evidence that this violation and negligence caused a negative outcome (medically, legally, or financially)
3. In turn, these outcomes must have resulted in even more damages (typically financial)

Malpractice and Standards of Care and Conduct

Medical malpractice and legal malpractice both involve industry standards. Medical malpractice involves an alleged breach in standards of care, while legal malpractice involves an alleged breach in standards of conduct. Both are extremely serious.

Medical standards of care vary according to specialties and geographic regions. For this reason, the accused professional is judged against a colleague of comparable skills within the same field. The standard of care asks whether that colleague, when faced with the same set of circumstances, would have acted similarly or differently.

Legal standards of conduct are primarily based on the ethics rules set forth by each state’s bar association. Unlike medical malpractice cases, attorneys are not judged against colleagues to determine if their behavior was appropriate. Instead, they are judged against the corresponding state’s ethics rules. 

Malpractice and Negative Outcomes

For a malpractice suit to move forward, there has to be evidence of a negative outcome resulting from a medical professional’s breach of care or a legal professional’s breach in conduct. Medical negligence typically causes physical harm, but legal negligence can have a wider variety of negative outcomes.

Examples of medical negligence include ignoring or forgetting patient history, misreading lab results, misdiagnosis, unnecessary or wrong site surgery, improper aftercare, and premature discharge. Typically, this leads to further medical problems and, in very serious cases, the death of a patient.

Examples of legal negligence include failure to disclose conflicts of interest, misuse of client funds or billing fraud, breach of attorney-client privilege, improper legal advice, malicious or excessive litigation, presenting false evidence, and obstruction of justice. These can certainly lead to a poor legal outcome for a client’s case, but may also cause the client to suffer financially or personally.

Malpractice and Significant Damages

Once a plaintiff has proven medical or legal negligence and shown direct links between the negligence and a following negative outcome, they must then show that the negative outcome led to significant damages. Essentially, this means that the negative outcome had a similarly serious and negative impact on your life.

For medical malpractice cases, this often involves proving that the negative outcome led to further physical hardship, such as a permanent disability or unusual suffering, or financial hardship, such as loss of income or high medical bills. The assigned cost of the hardship, in whatever form it takes, must surpass the costs associated with pursuing the malpractice case.

Legal malpractice cases are very similar. The plaintiff must show that the negligence and negative outcome caused further hardship, either legally, financially, or in another manner. And, just as in medical malpractice cases, the costs of the injury must be far in excess of the costs of litigation.