By Nancy Fraser, RN, CEO, Med Legal Consulting Source

During his long and illustrious career, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. was passionate about protecting the interests of ordinary people. He looked out for them, seeking justice for the injured and their families. He founded a network of law offices across America to help serve their needs. That legacy endures at The Firm, from an outside perspective, as one of the most respected and largest practices representing injured parties.

A crucial element in seeking justice is assessing damages in all injury cases is the consideration of future medical care. Well rounded medical records companies can be a boon to plaintiff’s attorneys as they seek to maximum damages and ensure they have done their duty in considering their client’s future care needs: For settlement purposes, they can bring in highly qualified and certified personnel, including legal nurse consultants and life care planners, to sketch or provide in great detail an expert assessment of what kind of care a patient-plaintiff may need for life – and how much it might cost – due to injury, harm or ailing chronic condition. These studies are commonly known as cost projections or life care plans. Tapping into this planning expertise, plaintiff’s attorneys also can work with medical records companies to seek from them damages estimates and cost calculations.

Life care planners prepare life-care plans by examining an array of materials and sources, including medical records, depositions, expert reports, existing literature and market data. They can conduct their own clinical interviews of patients, family and care providers. They’ll take into consideration the patient’s long-term need for and cost of procedures, therapies, hospitalizations, medications, testing, transportation, equipment, supplies, orthotics, prostheses, architectural renovations and home remodeling and refurbishing. While they will tap a potentially wide, deep spectrum of information sources, they will distill their findings into an authoritative report, reports or other accessible presentation.

Plaintiff’s lawyers report that life care plans give them and opposing counsel a sound means for settlement negotiations with their expert, objective and needs-based analyses. The reports help counsel distinguish fast what’s necessary versus what’s desirable in care that must be covered in a settlement and with damages. The plans also can be highly cost-effective litigation tools because counsel can decide in advance with medical records companies as to the reports’ depth and breadth, which can be a swift sketch or a major, detailed study. In a best-case scenario, their superbly sourced, convincing findings can push along a settlement by persuading parties not to bring in an expensive parade of witnesses at trial.

Because life care plans trace their origin to practices connected with major rehabilitative care, many attorneys have employed these expert analyses only in big, catastrophic cases or huge chronic ones where damage awards are believed likely to be great. But with the cost-efficient efforts of legal nurse consultants and life care planners combining with attorneys’ increased experience, familiarity and comfort with the documents, cost-projections and mini-life care plans are producing fine results with greater frequency in lesser-value cases, too. With the affordable, credible, factual plans in hand, plaintiff’s attorneys say that cases they once might have resolved for $150,000, instead, settle at $275,000, and cases that might have ended with $300,000 for a client conclude with a $500,000 settlement.

Med Legal Consulting Source, a certified woman owned business, founded in 2000, is The Cochran Firm’s national service provider for customized medical record analysis, medical bill audits, and life care planning services. Work is delivered in timely, thorough, customizable reports that make even the most complicated case comprehensible for all levels of client staff. Med Legal can be reached at (213) 347-0203 or nfraser@medlegal-la.com.