If you’ve been involved in a birth injury, then a highly trained birth injury attorney can help you win compensation for what you’ve been through. Finding the right attorney is key to winning a settlement that covers damages such as medical bills, future medical costs, and emotional damage, so let’s look at some of the key things to look for when hiring someone to take on your case.
How to Find the Right Birth Injury Attorney: 7 Things To Check and Look For
1. Check Their Qualifications
Take a look at your attorney’s qualifications. Make sure they graduated from a good school and are qualified to be working as a birth injury lawyer in Baltimore. Ensure the establishment they trained at is in good standing and has a reputation for its law students graduating and going on to have long and successful careers.
2. Checks Their Past Cases
Take a look at the types of cases your attorney has taken on in the past. Birth injuries are a type of medical malpractice case, so your attorney may have taken on general medical practice cases such as misdiagnosis, surgical errors, and a couple of birth injury cases here and there. This is okay, but you won’t have the best chance of success with an attorney like this.
You want your attorney to have worked on exclusively or mostly birth injury cases. Furthermore, if they worked on cases as similar to yours as possible, then you know you’re getting an attorney who knows what they’re doing. Every little detail matters, so ask your attorney about the types of cases they usually work on and compare them to yours.
3. Check Their Success Rate
Has your attorney had more losses than wins? In that case, you need to look better attorney. You want somebody who has won more cases than they’ve lost, and ideally, those wins will be recent.
Making sure the wins are in cases similar to yours is also a must. If they’ve only won cases where infants obtained temporary injuries, then they may not be the best fit for your case where your child was left with a lasting disability. It takes a different skill set to win a different type of case, so a lot of wins in cases that aren’t similar to yours may not be indicative of how they’ll perform when working with you.
4. Check Client Testimonials
Sometimes incredible lawyers are difficult to work with, and you really don’t need that during this stressful time. You’ve suffered an emotional trauma, so you need to work with somebody who’ll make you feel comfortable and supported. If any of the clients in the testimonials were being made feel uncomfortable or upset by this attorney, then you need to work with somebody else.
5. Look for Someone Empathetic
Once you can be sure your attorney has the right experience, success rate, and history of working with people well, then you can start narrowing down to see whether your attorney’s personality and the traits they show are a good fit for you and your circumstances.
Empathy is a must in lawyers working on birth injury cases, as you may be suffering from PTSD and other emotionally stressful conditions after a difficult birth. Someone who understands how you feel will absolutely not let your emotional damages go unheard and uncompensated.
6. Look for Someone Understanding
You may find yourself getting overwhelmed or overemotional while attempting to work with your attorney, and that’s fine. Your attorney should understand this and let you take a couple of minutes to settle yourself if needed. Someone who rushes you and doesn’t seem to understand what you’re going through isn’t somebody that you want to work with, no matter how good they appear to be at their job.
Your mental health should take priority over working with someone who can’t understand your pain—ask them to refer you to a different attorney within the firm if they display a lack of understanding.
7. Look for Someone Who Listens
Good listening skills are vital in attorneys. They need to understand your story thoroughly and listen for the little details. This will help them build your case and defend you effectively in the courtroom. An attorney who talks over you and thinks they know more about your case than you do before they ask questions isn’t someone you want to work with. Hearing your story in full and asking questions about the situation will help build your case.
A mixture of appropriate personality traits and high qualifications and success rates make an attorney the perfect person to work with. Never hire someone who doesn’t make you feel completely at ease, and don’t skimp on hiring a well-established professional who’ll do everything they can to make your case as successful as the ones they’ve worked on in the past.
