When you think of “professional malpractice,” you may think immediately of medical malpractice. And while the two are related, they are not one in the same. Although it is true that you can hold all medical professionals accountable if their negligence results in your harm, medical professionals are not alone in their accountability to their clients, patients and others who contract their services.
Attorneys, accountants, financial planners, and even morticians have a duty to act within the standards of care for their professions—or be held accountable for any harm they cause as a result.
Professionals are simply people with advanced experience and usually advanced degrees that make them experts in their respective fields. When you hire a professional to do a job for you—whether that’s pulling a tooth, preparing your personal income tax return, or managing your retirement portfolio—you have a legal expectation that they will act in the same vein that an equally trained and experienced professional in their niche would act.
If their actions are reckless or careless, and you experience a loss as a result—even a purely financial loss—then you have a right to seek damages from them, and our Bensalem Professional Malpractice Attorney can help.
Types of professional dishonesty
While an array of professionals may find themselves staring down the receiving end of a professional malpractice claim if they fail to render their services with care, the most common types of cases seen in this area of the law include:
- Legal malpractice. While losing a case is not necessarily grounds for a lawsuit, attorneys can run afoul of their professional duties in a myriad of ways, such as settling a case without consulting a client, providing ineffective counsel, or breaching the client’s attorney-client confidentiality.
- Financial malpractice. Fiscal injury caused by financial advisors is also the focus of many professional malpractice claims. Providing advice in an area where the professional is untrained or failing to advise an investor of a particular strategy are some examples of malpractice in the financial sector.
- Medical malpractice. So many things can go wrong with you’re dealing with the human body and a careless medical professional. From leaving surgical sponge or tools inside the body during an operation to failing to take adequate medical histories, errors by medical professionals are now the leading cause of Death. When doctors, nurses, midwives, physician assistants, radiologists and other medical professionals fail to live up to the recognized standard of care, they can be held accountable for damages to their patients.
- Dental malpractice. Although dental work seems straightforward, things can still go wrong in the dental chair or during oral surgery. Dentists are sometimes brought to task for causing nerve tissue damage, extracting teeth that are healthy and should be left in place, or even causing injury to the patient’s jaw during extraction.
Evidence of professional malpractice can be glaring in some cases and extremely difficult to prove in others. Discuss Your Situation and the particulars of your case with our Bensalem Professional Malpractice Attorney now to determine your legal rights.