Every medical-negligence enquiry a firm receives forces the same quiet calculation: is this one worth a senior lawyer's time? It is the most consequential decision in the practice — and the least examined.
The real cost isn't running claims. It's deciding which to run.
To form a genuine view on a claim's merits — not a gut feeling, but a defensible position — takes a senior practitioner the better part of three days. Records have to be requested and chased. Instructions taken. Breach weighed against the standard of care. And causation, the hardest part, worked through honestly. Call it twenty-plus hours of your most expensive, most scarce time.
Now multiply by the enquiries that never become files. For every matter you run, several are assessed and set aside. That assessment cost is real whether or not the claim proceeds — and it lands on exactly the people you can least afford to tie up.
The two ways it hurts
- Run a claim that should have been declined, and the workup that follows is lost when it fails.
- Decline a claim that had merit — because there wasn't time to look properly — and a wronged client walks, along with the matter.
Both are failures of triage, not of advocacy. The bottleneck is judgement under time pressure, applied at the front of the funnel.
Why firms tolerate it
Because the alternatives have always been worse: carry more senior capacity than your matter flow justifies, or assess on instinct and accept the misses. Most firms quietly choose instinct and live with the asymmetry.
A third option
The merits question is a discrete, self-contained piece of work — and it can be handed off. Send the case; the records get chased, the instructions taken, the merits examined, the clinical picture tested. You receive a clear, considered view on whether it is worth running. You keep conduct and every ounce of discretion, and you only pay if you proceed.
That changes the maths. Scarce senior hours go back to the matters you have already decided to run. The triage decision is made on a complete view rather than a hurried one. And the cost of assessing the claims you decline falls to nothing.
The question was never whether to assess merits carefully. It is who should bear the twenty hours — and when.