In medical negligence, the law and the medicine are inseparable. A breach of duty means little without causation — and causation is, at root, a clinical question. So the merits of a claim can't be settled from the file alone. They have to be tested against what medicine would actually expect.
What "the merits" really means
Three things have to hold together:
- Breach — did the care fall below the standard a competent practitioner would have met?
- Causation — did that failure actually cause the harm complained of, or would it have happened anyway?
- The standard of care — the benchmark against which both are measured.
A claim can be strong on one and fatally weak on another. The work is in seeing the whole picture before a firm commits to it.
It starts with the records — all of them
You can't assess what you can't see. The first task is to request the medical records and follow them up until they are complete — the part that quietly consumes the most time and stalls the most assessments. A partial record is how good claims get wrongly declined and weak ones wrongly run.
Then the client's account
Where it matters, the client's own recollection — what they were told, what they consented to, what changed — fills gaps the records don't capture and sharpens the questions worth asking of the clinical picture.
Then the medicine, tested honestly
This is the heart of it. The clinical merits are examined against the standard a competent practitioner would be held to, and pressure-tested with practising clinicians — not to confirm a hoped-for answer, but to find the right one.
Would a reasonable practitioner have acted differently? And if so, would the outcome have changed? An honest "no" to the second question ends more claims than a "no" to the first.
The output: a position, not a hedge
What comes back is not a memo of possibilities. It is a clear, considered view — worth running, or a clear reason not to — with the reasoning it rests on, ready to act on. The firm reviews it and decides. Conduct, and discretion, never leave the firm.
The discipline is simple to state and hard to practise: look properly, test the medicine, and be willing to say a claim isn't worth running. That willingness is what makes the "worth running" verdicts worth something.