Medical negligence cases are exceedingly difficult to win for a number of reasons.
First, juries in North Carolina are very conservative and tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the healthcare providers when there is any uncertainty as to whether they were negligent. Second, the law of North Carolina concerning medical malpractice lawsuits tend to favor doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers. Third, health care providers have a much easier time obtaining highly qualified experts to testify on their behalf.Proving negligence in a medical malpractice case is difficult.
The plaintiff’s lawyer is often stuck with nothing more to rely upon than the doctor’s own notes, which may very well be cryptic and self-serving. The lawyer needs to work with his/her medical experts to find out what the doctor actually did and what the doctor should have done.
Very few doctors are going to acknowledge that they made a mistake.According to statistics maintained by the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts, juries find in favor of the healthcare providers in over 90% of the cases that are tried to verdict. The newspapers often have articles about people who won millions of dollars in a medical malpractice lawsuit, but there are rarely any articles about all of the people who lost their medical malpractice cases -- and losing the case at trial is the more common outcome.