How To Know if You Have a Nursing Home Abuse Case

When people first call Lanzone Morgan, the first thing on their mind is, do I have a case? Or did what happened to my loved one rise to the level of filing a lawsuit? They may never have been involved in a lawsuit before. They may have never even talked to an attorney before, but they call our office with these questions and problems on their mind. So the first thing they do is they get the receptionist. And they tell the receptionist, I want to talk to somebody about a case.

The receptionist puts them through to one of our experienced intake coordinators. Our intake coordinators will either talk to them when they call or set a time to talk to them because sometimes we need 15 minutes, maybe 30 minutes or 45 minutes of uninterrupted time to ask them a bunch of questions. We ask them questions about the family, the nursing home, a victim, there are many things that go into determining whether we can help somebody or whether there’s a case. After our intake person asks the caller a bunch of questions, then the intake coordinator will take that information and bring it to the partners, me and Mr. Lanzone. And then we’ll decide, is this something we can help this family with? Or not. If it’s not something we can help the family with, hopefully we can refer them to some resources, where they may be able to find the answer, or maybe another attorney who handles this type of issue.

But if it’s something we think we might be able to help with. Then what we’ll do is we’ll usually take the next step which is getting the medical records. So we have the caller or the appropriate person sign medical authorizations, then we’ll get medical records. Sometimes from a hospital, sometimes from a nursing home and a hospital, but we need to find out what was the victim’s condition. Prior to going to the nursing home, what was their condition while at the nursing home and what kind of care did they get? And then what was their condition when they went to the hospital? Why did they go to the hospital? Did they go to the hospital because the natural course of their medical history or their condition? Or did they go to the hospital because they were neglected? Did they go to the hospital because they were severely dehydrated? Because they had an infection? Maybe a urinary tract infection? Were they malnourished? Did they lose a lot of weight? Did they have a fall? Did they have bed sores? So we like to look at the hospital records and find out what kind of condition was this person in when they left the nursing home?

Usually by gathering those records, we can tell with 95% certainty if there’s going to be a case or not. Then we’ll talk to the client. We’ll tell him, hey, here’s what we think. We think there’s enough for a case, or we may not think there’s enough for a case, but if there is a case then we’ll sign them up and we’ll talk to them about the next steps.