Nursing Home Attorneys

The Nursing Home Abuse Attorneys at Senior Justice Law Firm

Should I hire a nursing home abuse attorney?
Quick Answer: Yes, if your loved one has been injured or killed in a nursing home, a dedicated attorney specializing in nursing home abuse can conduct a thorough investigation and provide your family with answers. Additionally, a nursing home abuse attorney can secure financial compensation for your family. This nursing home settlement not only compensates you for your loss, it also acts as a financial deterrent against future abuse or neglect.

Attorneys focused on cases involving nursing home negligence. This is all that we do.
Contact our nursing home abuse lawyers today for a free consultation:
888-375-9998

Representing Victims of Nursing Home Abuse, Neglect, Negligence and Wrongful Death

Senior Justice Law Firm is one of the few law firms in the nation that focuses on nursing home abuse cases. We are not car accident lawyers who occasionally handle a nursing home negligence case. Nursing home abuse lawsuits are what our attorneys do. Our lawyers have helped bring healing, closure and justice to thousands of families impacted by nursing home abuse and neglect.

Attorney Tip

Document everything. Keep detailed records of all interactions and care received in the nursing home to ensure any signs of neglect or abuse are thoroughly recorded and can be effectively addressed.

We are not a lawyer referral service. You will not see us on a billboard. We are an elder abuse focused law firm uniquely concentrating on this very narrow practice area.

Let our nursing home abuse attorneys’ decades of experience and compassionate approach guide you on your journey to justice. Call us today for a free case consultation to learn why we are different from general personal injury law firms.

Nursing Home Abuse Injuries – Indicators of Nursing Home Negligence

Keep a watchful eye on your loved one in the facility.

Remember, most victims of nursing home abuse cannot self-report injuries. Many cannot speak at all. Therefore, it is the duty of the family to monitor your loved one’s health and skin conditions. If you even suspect nursing home negligence, make your concerns known.

If your family member suffered any of the following injuries, contact our nursing home abuse attorneys immediately.

• Pressure Sores
• Falls Resulting in Broken Bones
• Brain Bleeds
• Unexplained Broken Bones
• Significant Weight Loss
• Sepsis
• Amputation
• Choking Death
• Medication Mistakes
• Patient Wandering out of the Facility
• Sexual Assault & Abuse
• Physical Attacks
• Wheelchair Transfer Injuries
• Pneumonia
• Aspiration Pneumonia
• Infections
• Urinary Tract Infections
• Wrongful Death

Our skilled nursing home lawyers have extensive experience handling cases involving the above injuries. The above injuries are strongly suggestive of nursing home abuse or neglect. Begin your investigation into the truth behind your family member’s injury today. Call our legal team now at 888-375-9998 or submit a written inquiry to our lawyers via our website.

Is It My Fault Since I Put my Parent in a Nursing Home?

Many of our clients struggle with the decision to place their parent or loved one inside a facility. When something terrible happens in the facility, they blame themselves. However, this kind of guilt is misplaced entirely. Here’s why.

1. Your parent needed to be in a nursing home. America’s skilled nursing facilities are 24 hour care facilities. They are legally required to be adequately staffed to provide round the clock care, assistance and supervision to high acuity residents. This means, if your parent was “a handful” or “combative”, they belong in a professional facility like a nursing home.
2. Most facilities are for-profit, and are paid handsomely to care for your parent. Do not believe the hype. Running a skilled nursing facility chain is quite lucrative. These for-profit owners take much needed tax-payer revenue, in the form of Medicaid and Medicare dollars, and siphon it to related companies. Nursing home companies are literally paid tens of thousands of dollars per month to care for patients like your parent.
3. Many of these for-profit facilities are intentionally understaffed with unqualified workers, in order to make more money. The majority of for profit nursing facilities have a hard time providing appropriate levels of care and supervision for patients, because they operate on low staff numbers. When a facility understaffs to make more money, inevitably, injuries occur. Although bed sores, falls, medication mistakes and untreated infection are all very different injuries, the root cause of these injuries is usually the same; understaffing.
4. Placing your parent in a nursing home does not excuse the facility from abusing or neglecting your parent. It is time to let go of the guilt! It is not your fault that your parent was neglected inside a long term care facility. It is exactly this kind of mentality that allows nursing home corporations to get away with neglecting residents while avoiding consequences. Channel your guilt into more positive avenues like advocacy to ensure this does not happen again. Contact a nursing home abuse attorney and report the facility for it’s neglectful care.

Our Nursing Home Attorneys Explain the Legal Process Behind a Claim for Nursing Home Abuse

Many of the questions potential clients ask us pertain to the legal process behind a nursing home negligence lawsuit. Our nursing home lawyers have compiled a fairly exhaustive timeline of what to expect when bringing a claim against a skilled nursing facility.

Setting Up Your Free Case Consultation

Unsure about moving forward with your claim? That’s OK. We provide completely free case consultations. There is no cost for speaking with us and there is no obligation to move forward with your claim. We can coordinate a convenient time to go over your legal options. From there, the decision is yours.

Logistically, to begin the investigation, you would call our nursing home law firm toll-free at 888-375-9998. There, our intake department would gather some basic information from you about your potential case. After we gather this information, if this is a case we can help you with, one of our nursing home attorneys will call you at a time convenient for you. We understand that you are busy!

Signing Up Your Case

If we believe we can help on your case, we will send you a contract. Alternatively, if it is more convenient for you, we can schedule an in-person meeting in one of our offices.

The contract will contain the terms of the contingency fee agreement, as well as medical authorizations. The contingency fee agreement will contain the terms which explain, among other things, that we only get paid if we obtain money for you. The medical authorizations allow us to request your family member’s medical records.

The Pre-Suit Period Before Litigation

Our nursing home lawyers must complete a number of tasks to get your case off the ground before the filing of a lawsuit. Typically, we will request complete copies of your family member’s medical records (unless you can provide these records to us). Once we gather your loved one’s records, we may have them reviewed by an expert witness. This allows us to verify the merits of your nursing home negligence lawsuit. Additionally, we may work with a probate lawyer to open an estate of the deceased. This will give you standing to bring a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of your loved one who passed away. Lastly, we may engage in pre-suit discovery with the negligent nursing home.

Our nursing home lawyers handle these pre-suit tasks on your behalf.

A Quick Discussion on Settlement

We prepare every nursing home abuse case as if it were going to trial. That being said, the overwhelming majority (95%) of our caseload settles without going to trial.

Because of our vast experience suing negligent nursing homes, we have developed relationships with many of the large corporate chains. Due to these relationships, many cases settle early. Some even settle without the filing of a lawsuit.

Although we continue discussing the litigation process below, it is important to note that your case can settle at any time. Our nursing home lawyers are trial lawyers by definition. However, we place our client’s wishes as the top priority. If your desire is to settle your nursing home case without going to trial, we can typically accomplish this.

Filing the Lawsuit and Suing the Nursing Home

The lawsuit allegations usually contained in a Complaint detail what the nursing home did wrong and what happened as a result. A normal nursing home lawsuit complaint will allege breaches in the standard of care, resident’s rights violations and/or negligent actions on the part of the nursing home staff.

The Defendant(s) will typically file an Answer to the Complaint, or a Motion to Dismiss. This begins the litigation process.

Litigation Discovery

Once we have a case number in the court system or an arbitration case style, we can begin sending subpoenas. This means we can subpoena medical records, death certificates, police investigations, state department of health reports and other documents. We can also send discovery requests to the Defendant facility. Through discovery, we can request documents, records, incident reports, photographs, and other pertinent documents.

Additionally, this gives us the power to set witnesses for deposition.

Depositions

Your nursing home case can be won or lost in depositions. Depositions are the sworn testimony of witnesses in your case. For example, your nursing home lawyer may depose the aide that saw your loved one fall in the facility. It may mean that the other side may depose the medical examiner in order to establish the official cause of death.

Regardless, through deposition, our nursing home abuse attorneys elicit testimony that can be used in the underlying trial or arbitration.

Mediation

Assuming your case has not settled yet, before trial, most Judges compel the parties to attend mediation. This means you are forced to sit down in a room with the other parties and try to settle your case.

Expert Disclosure and Discovery of Nursing Home Expert Witnesses

Expert witnesses are vitally important in the trial of a nursing home negligence lawsuit. Expert witnesses are retained at the costs of the parties. These hired experts opine on the case and offer opinions to the jury.

As nursing home lawyers, we utilize the nation’s foremost long-term care expert witnesses in order to make our case as strong as possible to the jury or arbitrators.

Trial

If your case does not resolve prior to trial, our nursing home lawyers will try your case. This may mean we try the case before a jury of your peers or before an arbitration panel. Nursing home abuse trials may be as quick as four days or may go as long as four weeks. This all depends on the injuries, corporate misconduct, and evidence in the record.

More About Senior Justice Law Firm

Senior Justice Law Firm is composed of lawyers hungry for justice. Our nursing home abuse attorneys devote their professional careers to fighting nursing home abuse in multiple states and venues. With decades of experience focusing on this very niche practice, our attorneys can help you achieve justice for your wrongfully neglected loved one.

Our nursing home lawyers are licensed in various states. We currently have attorneys barred in Florida, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia. In addition to these states, our attorneys have appeared pro hac vice in specific nursing home cases in other states across the U.S. We regularly co-counsel with attorneys in other states in order to assist in nursing home negligence cases of magnitude. If we are unable to appear on your behalf in your state, we may be able to refer you to a local nursing home lawyer who can help you with your case.

Dedicated Nursing Home Abuse Attorneys, Tirelessly Advocating for Our Clients

Most important of all, we care. This is not lip service. We mean it. Nursing home abuse is disgusting. Our elderly deserve to age with dignity, free from abuse and neglect. When we accept a nursing home abuse lawsuit, we fight like the victim was our family member.

Our lawyers have forgone specializing in other areas because we genuinely want to make a difference in America’s long-term care problems. Because of our narrow niche practice, we pride ourselves on being able to dig deeper than most other firms.

You wouldn’t go to a spine surgeon who also dabbles in brain, foot, ankle and eye surgery. Shouldn’t you demand the same specialization in your attorney?

If you need an aggressive, compassionate and narrowly focused nursing home abuse attorney, demand Senior Justice.

Caring for Nursing Home Residents is Big Business

The skilled nursing facility industry is estimated to generate $312 billion annually by the year 2027. Almost all of this revenue is taxpayer money. Most of the facilities are corporate-owned and part of a large, nationwide chain of nursing homes.

This may be true of your parent’s nursing home, even if it is not marketed as part of a large corporate chain.

Finding Corporate Misconduct

This may surprise you, but your nursing home negligence case is about much more than just your loved one’s injury. You may view the case as an individual act or omission on the part of one bad aide or a single negligent nurse.

However, our nursing home abuse lawyers understand that most nursing home neglect cases derive from a much deeper form of wrongdoing. Corporate greed, misconduct and systemic understaffing are the cancerous roots of most instances of nursing home abuse.

When a corporation understaffs or under-budgets a facility, the result is mayhem in the nursing home. Inattentive and undertrained staff cannot safely complete their duties. As a result, patients fall, get bed sores, go unsupervised and get ignored. The tragic underbelly of all this is that most instances of patient injuries could have been prevented if the facility hired the right staff.

Our Nursing Home Abuse Attorneys Dig Deep into Corporate Wrongdoing

For this reason, it is crucial that your nursing home lawyer understands the inner workings of the parent company of the facility. Senior Justice Law Firm has nursing home lawyers with accounting and taxation backgrounds specifically to audit the offending facility and follow the money. We have databanks of corporate depositions of executive vice presidents and administrators. We are actively involved with various US Attorneys’ offices in prosecuting qui tam cases for fraud and abuse in nursing homes.

Our nursing home lawyers have diagrams of complex webs of shell companies and corporate structure on large nursing home chains. This helps us win nursing home negligence cases nationwide. We do all this because we want to maximize your case value and establish who really makes the decisions at your specific facility.

Let Our Nursing Home Attorneys Help You and Your Family

You have nothing to lose by calling our firm today. We are here to help pick up the pieces following a family tragedy. At the very least, speak with our nursing home lawyers to learn your legal rights in bringing a nursing home abuse lawsuit.