Making the Case: The Importance of using a medical legal consultant with your medical demonstrative evidence

Written By:
Paulette Campbell RN-BC, BSN, MJ
Certified Legal Nurse Consultant

Studies have shown that about 70% of juries are visual learners and 20% are auditory learners. If you are not using these forms of communication to speak to you audience, you can be ignoring about 80% of your audience. Medical exhibits can make sure that you are speaking to 100% of the audience, 100% of the time.

Medical exhibits can be key pieces to the success of a case. They offer an effective way to present your client’s point of view in a memorable way. Complicated medical issues that are difficult to convey, or may be difficult for parties to remember or comprehend, can be enhanced by medical illustrations.

However, as much good as medical exhibits can be, they can also be a distraction and cause confusion to interested parties. In order to avoid this, it is critical that medical exhibits are prepared with key case issues in mind and with the input of medical legal consultants.

Medical legal consultants are helpful in the determining what are the key issues of the case. Specifically, by reviewing the medical record, medical legal consultants are able to ascertain what the key issues of the case are. They can then help determine what is the best way to present these issues to the mediator, judge, opposing counsel or jury through demonstrative evidence. Medical exhibits can take many forms; medical timelines, medical illustrations, enlarged pieces of the medical record, fetal heart tracings, medical definitions and animation are just glimpses at the possibilities.

Another advantage to your case by using a medical legal consultant is that they often bring experience of presenting complex medical issues to a lay person in a manner that can be easily understood. In fact, it’s important to make sure that your medical legal consultant can speak to such experience before signing them on to work with you.

Medical exhibits can also help you address liability and damages. A medical legal consultant can help you make the arguments that support or dispute liability and damage arguments. Again, with the understanding as an experienced healthcare provider who has been in the practice of explaining medical information to a lay population, they can help you determine how to express the complicated in a comprehensive and understandable manner.

At Medical Jurisprudence, Inc. we are experienced in helping our clients find solutions such as these. Our medical legal consultants will help you find solutions to medical exhibiting in the following ways;

Identifying Key Issues: We’ll review the medical record to help you determine key case issues. Then we will assist you in deciding which key issues need a medical exhibit.

Prepare the Case: We will create timelines, chronologies and write summaries so that you can have the time to focus on other critical areas of the case.

Develop Case Themes: We’ll assist you in developing and identifying case themes so that case presentation and medical exhibits are presented to interested parties in a consistent and coherent manner.

Address Liability and Damages: We’ll help you to ensure that medical exhibits and case themes provide the needed tools to assert or dispute any liability and damages argument.

Expert Witness Identification and Location: Not only will we help identify needed experts, but we will also find them for you. Next, we will make sure that the experts are properly matched up with proposed medical exhibits.

Contact our office today to find out how we will customize this solution for your specific needs. You can contact our medical legal consulting office at 630-551-0978 or info@medicaljurisprudence.com.