Have you or a loved one suffered abuse or neglect while in the care of a nursing home?  You’ve come to the right place.  A nursing home attorney is a an attorney who specializes in going after poorly run nursing homes on behalf of the nursing home guests who may have suffered because of negligence or worse on the part of the facility.  Because many of the issues are the same, medical malpractice and personal injury attorneys are also nursing home attorneys. All are “plaintiffs’ attorneys.  That is, all work for victims seeking money to get their lives back in order.

As plaintiffs’ attorneys, they usually work for a “contingency fee”.  Working for a contingency fee means they only get paid from the proceeds of money that they win for the victim.  Because of this, the initial consultation with a nursing home attorney is usually free.

The best way to find a nursing home attorney is by checking out plaintiffs’ attorney firms with large advertising budgets.  As obnoxious as most ads are, they indicate that the firm is successful in getting money from wrongdoers — that’s how they pay for the advertising.  Since going after nursing homes to help victims recover is relatively new, there are few billboards and internet advertisements for them.  However, plaintiffs’ attorney firms are easy to spot — they are the ones who advertise to represent victims in cases involving personal injury and medical malpractice.  These are the firms you should contact first — remember, referrals are often good, but in the case of lawyers one must be careful of the “charity referral” to a cousin or friend who may lack the resources and experience.

Avoid This Costly Mistake

Don’t do nothing.  You must act.  All states require that you take action within a certain amount of time from when the harm occurred.  Also, and this is costly mistake made all too often, don’t think that the family can’t bring the nursing home to justice because the elderly guest has since passed away.  Usually the estate of the guest who has died has the right to recover money from the nursing home.

What is nursing home negligence?  How can a legal claim arise from it?  If, in the unfortunate event you or a loved one has had a bad experience at a nursing home, you are probably asking yourself these questions.  Here’s a quick primer to get you to speed as you consider whether to contact a nursing home attorney to help you get things back on track.

Put simply, negligence occurs when someone has a duty to do something (or perhaps not to do something) and they fail to live up to that duty.   The duty imposed on a person based on the idea of negligence is different from the duty imposed based on a contract (although as we will see below, the two ideas are often intertwined when it comes to nursing homes).   With a contract, a party to the contract has a duty to perform as the contract directs based on the mutual promises it contains.  But with negligence, the duty to do or not do something arises from the fact that it is reasonably foreseeable that the failure to live up to the duty will harm someone.

Thus I have a duty, say, to trim the branches of a backyard tree carefully because it is foreseeable that if I’m sloppy, or one might say, negligent, a branch might fall on my neighbor’s shed and damage it.  I might have to pay him for the shed even though there is no contract between us saying that I must watch out for his shed.

In the case of a nursing home, a breach in the contract relationship with the facility — that is, the agreement between the guest and the facility that says the guest will live and be cared for their in exchange for money — may also be negligence.  For example, a contract with nursing home may state that the facility will supply fresh linens twice a week.  If it fails to do so, then there is a breach of contract and a legal claim will arise from that.  It is possible, however, that a legal claim will also arise from negligence in that situation independent of the breach of contract.  Why?  Because it is foreseeable that if a guest is forced to remain on soiled linens, dangerous bed sores and infections may result.

What then is a legal claim based on negligence?  Again, it is not overly complicated.  If a person is harmed by a person’s negligence, and that harm is capable of having a, in a sense, a “price tag” put on it, then the wrongdoer must pay that price tag.  The legal claim, basically, is the victim’s right to ask a court to require the wrongdoer to pay that price tag, or as we say in court to make the victim “whole”.