Interviewer: When you meet with the client, is there any other information that they provide to you that you recommend? You can make like a short list of what they should provide to you during the initial meeting.
Mark Taylor: The more information they can provide the better. It is not at all uncommon that we help them get the details that we need. Most people don’t come to our office with all of their medical records, and so we work with them to get the part of the medical records that we’ll need to even evaluate the case. The more details they can provide to us, the better.
In many of these cases, specific dates can be important. They can be important, as we mentioned, for the statute of limitations, but also it’s just important to get a good understanding of how the disease or condition that was being treated was progressing. How many visits were there and when did they see the doctor that committed the negligence? Dates are important.
Certainly, knowing the names of doctors is a basic starting point that we’ll need to know to evaluate the case. We don’t have great expectations that people come to us with all of the information. It’s usually a process where during the course of the interview we’ll ask questions that they might not have the answer to. Part of what we do is figure out how to get those answers so we can continue with the case.
Another thing that is helpful is if they have a lost wages claim. That’s going to be part of their case – it affected their ability to work or earn money. The details of that is certainly something that we have to have. We might not have to have it at the inception of the case, but that’s something that a client can typically get on their own because it usually involves information with their employer or with the business that they run. They can obtain those records and figure out exactly how much time they lost and how much they lost in wages. They can help us with that.