Medical Malpractice Litigation

Proving medical negligence: the standard of care

Washington defines a malpractice claim by statute: a provider is liable when their care failed to meet the accepted standard of care for their profession and that failure caused the injury (RCW 7.70.030 and RCW 7.70.040). Proving it is the hard part. The standard of care is what a reasonably prudent provider in the same specialty would have done, and Washington requires qualified medical experts to establish both the standard and how it was breached, except in the rare case where the negligence is obvious to a layperson. Causation is equally demanding, because the defense will argue the bad outcome came from the underlying illness rather than the care. We build these cases with the right specialists from the start, because without credible expert testimony a malpractice claim does not survive.

Informed consent claims

A separate kind of claim arises not from how the treatment was performed but from what the patient was never told. Washington recognizes a cause of action for failure to obtain informed consent (RCW 7.70.050): a provider must disclose the material risks of a proposed treatment, the alternatives, and the risks of doing nothing, so the patient can make a real choice. When a serious risk that should have been disclosed comes to pass, and a reasonable patient told of it would have chosen differently, the lack of consent is itself actionable, separate from whether the treatment was performed competently. We evaluate the consent discussion and the records to determine whether the patient was truly informed or merely asked to sign.

The injuries we litigate

Medical malpractice takes many forms, and we handle the serious ones: misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis, especially of cancer and heart conditions where timing changes everything; surgical errors, including wrong-site surgery and retained instruments; birth injuries to mother or child; medication and anesthesia errors; and negligent nursing, monitoring, and hospital care. What these share is a serious, often permanent injury caused by a preventable failure, and a defense team that will work hard to attribute the harm to anything but the care. We take the cases where the injury is significant and the negligence is real, because the cost and difficulty of malpractice litigation only make sense when both are true.

Deadlines and the path to resolution

Medical malpractice claims run on strict deadlines and a defined procedure. Washington generally requires suit within three years of the negligent act, or within one year of when the patient discovered or should have discovered the injury, whichever is later (RCW 4.16.350); the discovery rule matters because some injuries surface long after the treatment. The statute once imposed an eight-year outer limit, but Washington's Supreme Court held that repose unconstitutional, so the discovery rule controls. Before trial, the law requires the parties to mediate (RCW 7.70.100), and many cases resolve there. We manage the timeline carefully, because a missed limitations deadline ends even the strongest case.

Damages and who is liable

When negligence is proven, the recovery has to account for everything the injury costs: past and future medical care, lost earning capacity, and the pain, disability, and loss of quality of life the patient lives with, and Washington, unlike many states, places no statutory cap on those noneconomic damages (its cap was struck down as unconstitutional in Sofie v. Fibreboard). Liability often reaches beyond the individual provider. A hospital can be vicariously responsible for its staff and directly liable for its own corporate negligence, such as negligent credentialing or inadequate staffing, and long-term-care facilities carry their own duties. We identify every responsible party and every available source of recovery, because a life-altering injury requires compensation that actually covers a lifetime.