Legal nurses, also called legal nurse consultants (LNCs), assist the legal team in analyzing cases potentially involving medical errors. LNCs’ clinical knowledge offers a unique contribution to understanding how situations may occur and provides an insider’s view of the complicated process of healthcare.
Depending on their worksite, legal nurses review and evaluate the documentation surrounding a medical occurrence, interview those involved, and create written chronologies to illustrate the event’s circumstances. Legal nurses help determine whether the actions of others were appropriate or should be called into question. They offer the legal team vital input to decide the case’s direction.
Legal nurses possess the skill to decipher nuances in standards of practice and explain them to the legal team or in the courts as expert witnesses.
Legal nurses often receive advanced training to improve their skills. For example, some start as paralegals and then take classes to become certified legal nurses. Others continue to obtain their master’s or doctoral degrees or become nurse attorneys.
Legal nurses review and summarize medical documents to enable the legal team to determine the case’s merits. After researching the medical literature, they must compare the actions that occurred against current standards of care. They may interview other health care providers and be involved in forming questions used in depositions. Some legal nurses participate in arbitration and mediation meetings between both sides involved.
Legal nurses who work in expanded settings such as case management or those who attend independent medical exams may have other duties involving more patient contact. Other legal nurses who have expertise in a specialty area such as orthopedics or neurology can expand into expert witness roles.
Legal nurses need the training to understand legal terminology. They use critical thinking, expert research skills, and ethics to understand how medical events occur. LNCs rely on their years of nursing experience to determine if a medical response met the standard of care.
Strong communication skills are needed to interact with lawyers and interview families or other health providers. They must remain objective so as not to misinterpret the facts presented. Legal nurses must be precise in their written descriptions and explanations of what the documents show and be able to lay out an accurate chronology of the situation to be presented in court.