Legal Nurse Consultants (LNCs) are licensed, registered nurses, often with post-graduate degrees, coupled with a nursing specialty certification, who assist attorneys with litigation involving health care. LNCs are nurses who worked several years in the nursing profession and completed a curriculum focused on the foundations of law, that discuss duty, breach, causation, and damages as it pertains to medical malpractice/negligence litigation.
LNCs use their professional clinical judgment to advise and educate attorneys pursuing these types of cases. As our friends at Legal Nurse Consulting, LLC can advise, unless an attorney has a formal background in health care, e.g., physician, physician’s assistant, registered nurse, nurse practitioner, etc., they do not possess the depth of knowledge required to litigate without the assistance of an LNC.
There are several areas in health care that an LNC can be of benefit to an attorney, some which are: Medical malpractice/negligence, personal injury, risk management/patient safety, life care planning, medicare set-asides, workers’ compensation, torts (such as medical device malfunction that causes injury), delivery of healthcare in the corrections system/civil rights, forensics, and fraudulent medical coding/billing to name a few.
Under the umbrella of medical malpractice/negligence lie several specialized areas of medicine and nursing. Most LNCs spent their nursing careers working in one or more of these areas. They are, but not limited to: Medical-surgical nursing, operating room, perioperative nursing, emergency/trauma nursing, obstetrics/labor & delivery/postpartum, pediatrics, neonatal intensive care, critical/cardiac care units, oncology, and long term/skilled nursing care, e.g., assisted living, nursing homes, veteran homes, memory care centers, etc.
Some of the tasks that LNCs perform that help attorneys prepare for litigation are: Review the case for merit, request medical records on behalf of the attorney, assemble annotated chronologies, draft summaries/briefs, attend defense medical exams, attend depositions and/or draft questions, act as testifying expert, or vetting and obtaining an expert for the attorney.
The process takes time and includes research, reading, and writing. The LNC must take into consideration the accepted standard of care at the time/date the incident occurred when drafting the reports for the attorney. Health standards of care change often which makes it critical for the LNC to be familiar with these updates as well as knowing where to find the current (and sometimes older) guidelines.
Nurses spend more time in their patients’ electronic medical record than at the bedside. This is one of the reasons attorneys work with LNCs. The LNC can quickly peruse thousands of pages of medical records in a short time because they know what they are looking for; whereas, an attorney might have to read each documented page very carefully, to make sense of it all.
LNCs work nationwide with an active registered nursing license that doesn’t have restrictions placed on it. They aren’t providing direct patient care, and this is what limits registered nurses to work within the state(s) their license is granted. Most of the work the LNC does involves the role of expert witness, which is subject to discovery or credibility and for those purposes, they must have a current nursing license. If your case involves medical problems, talk to your lawyer about bringing on an LNC to help your case.
