The nurses and doctors at Godoy Medical Forensics offer medico-legal consulting in criminal and civil cases and we can assist you in your case development and at trial. In many cases you do need a doctor to testify, but that doesn’t necessarily exclude the need for a nurse. It may actually save you money if you start with a nurse before you retain a doctor, and here’s how:
Examples of Services Rendered:
1. Medical Record Review and Analysis by a Registered Nurse and experienced Legal Nurse Consultant.
- Nurses trained in the review of records for criminal attorneys
- Nurses have varied backgrounds – mental health, emergency/trauma, pediatrics, obstetrics
2. Verbal or Written Report detailing the following information as applicable:
- Injuries, with description of causation, prognosis, complications and signs and symptoms.
- Issue summaries – opinions regarding the issues in the case and citing the relevant medical records.
- Recommendations for requesting missing records and expert testimony
- Cross or direct examination questions for testifying experts.
3. Expert location services
- Helping you find and screen the right expert, the first time.
Benefits of using a nurse prior to, or instead of, physician services:
1. Cost effective
- Our hourly rate is significantly lower than most experts.
- The option of a shorter “brief” report – often this is enough and a testifying expert is unnecessary, saving 1000’s of dollars.
- Efficient expert determination – the nurse can tell the attorney exactly what kind of expert they need to testify and we often have referrals for that expert. This takes the guess workout and many times the time spent locating experts is reduced.
2. Comprehension
- Our reports are designed for you, the attorney, to understand the medical records in language you comprehend. Many reports from other experts are more confusing than helpful.
Benefits of our fact chronologies:
- Reduces risk of missing vital information. Most experts do not read every page of voluminous records: We do.
- Expedites expert review – our reports are type-written and organized in chronological order so the expert can review them much faster than the unorganized handwritten medical records.
- Issues are isolated – The facts relating to each issue are organized in a separate chronology. This makes the expert review more efficient as well as pointing out issues that may have otherwise been missed.
- Record Organization with keyword searchable documents – Your expert has a full copy of the medical records that are organized in such a fashion that they can go directly to the record they are seeking. This avoids unnecessary billable hours of time spent looking for a single lab result or radiology report.
- Attorney Trial Development tool – a separate copy of the fact chronology is provided to the attorney with nursing comments and summaries. The expert copy has only medical facts from the records.
