A hospital or a doctor is supposed to catch the thing that is hurting you. When they miss it, the harm is often permanent, and the people responsible rarely volunteer that anything went wrong. But the medical record does because they were written at the time, by the people involved, before anyone was thinking about a claim.
Our Lake Oswego medical malpractice lawyers at Angel Law, P.C. have represented patients injured by hospital and physician negligence since 2010, and these cases turn on an independent physician reading the chart and saying plainly what it showed. In one of our clients’ cases, our med mal lawyer recovered $5 million from the Portland VA Hospital for a patient left partially paralyzed after staff missed the risk of a pulmonary embolism during surgery.
As these medical malpractice cases can be complex, you can contact us to provide your case’s details. You can call us at (503) 953-8224 and tell us what happened. If the records support a med mal claim, we will set a time for you to go through them with our trial attorney, Patrick D. Angel. For physical visits, our office is at 385 1st Street in Lake Oswego, and your first consultation is free.
Why Lake Oswego patients bring us their medical records:
- Licensed attorney in Oregon since 2003, and admitted to the Oregon state courts, the Oregon Court of Appeals, and the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon.
- Elected chair of the Oregon State Bar’s Product Liability Section in 2015 and 2016, a position inside the bar rather than a listing anyone can buy.
- Selected to Super Lawyers every year from 2014-2026.
- We keep the caseload small on purpose, and take a limited number of new cases each year.
- Six years in the U.S. Marine Corps infantry before law school, reaching sergeant with Task Force Ripper in the First Marine Division. Preparation is a habit, not a stage of the case.
Do You Have a Medical Malpractice Case?
You have a medical malpractice case if your medical provider fell below the accepted standard of care, and if that failure is what caused the harm. The test is narrower than most people expect. A bad outcome on its own is not malpractice. Medicine carries real risk, and a patient can get worse even when everyone involved did their job properly.
Oregon measures each provider against the care, skill, and diligence used by ordinarily careful providers in the same field and similar circumstances, in this community or one like it.
For a claim to exist, we have to prove four things:
- Duty. The provider was treating you.
- Breach. The care fell below that standard.
- Injury. You were harmed.
- Causation. The failure caused the harm, and not the illness you already had.
Causation is the one most cases turn on, and it is why an independent medical expert has to read the chart before anyone knows whether a claim exists. That burden sits at the center of how Oregon malpractice claims are proven.
Not sure whether what happened to you crosses that line? Most people are not, and that is the question the chart answers. Send us the records, or call (503) 953-8224 and we will tell you which ones to request.
How Medical Care Goes Wrong in Lake Oswego
Most of the medical negligence claims we take come from a short list of failures:
Birth Injury Claims
An injury during birth, where the harm is often not understood for years.
Surgical Errors
A surgical error, including an anesthesia mistake, or an infection after surgery that nobody recognized until it had done permanent damage.
Medical Misdiagnosis
A misdiagnosis or a failure to diagnose in time, where the treatable window closed while you were told nothing was wrong.
Hospital Negligence
A failure on the ward itself, such as a fall by a patient the staff already knew was at risk, or a medication prescribed, dispensed, or dosed wrongly.
Defective Medical Devices
A medical device that failed after it was implanted, such as a hip or knee implant, a stent, or surgical mesh.
VA Medical Claims
Care at a VA hospital, which runs on a federal process rather than Oregon’s.
Hospital Falls and Monitoring Failures
Hospital falls and monitoring failures are where most of our medical work has ended up, and it is where our verdict came from. We have handled hospital fall cases in which the patient had already been assessed as a fall risk and fell anyway. In those cases the answer was not in anyone’s recollection. It was in the chart, in what the assessment said and in what the staff did after it.
It is usually one of four things. The risk assessment was done on admission and never updated after surgery. A patient who needed help to the bathroom was left to go alone. Call lights went unanswered until the patient stopped waiting. Or the unit was short-staffed overnight and rounding quietly stopped.
A fall from a hospital bed onto a hard floor causes traumatic brain injuries, skull fractures, and bleeding on the brain. The same fall on a wet floor in a shop would be a slip and fall claim; inside a hospital it is judged against what the staff already knew. Where the failure is in the hospital’s own systems rather than one clinician’s mistake, the claim is one of hospital negligence.
Where Lake Oswego Patients Are Treated
Most Lake Oswego patients are treated outside the city, and that decides who a claim is against and where it is filed. Care commonly happens at hospitals in Tualatin, Oregon City and Clackamas, among them Legacy Meridian Park, Providence Willamette Falls and Kaiser Sunnyside.
Our office sits in Clackamas County. Which court a particular claim belongs in depends on where the care was given and who the defendant is, and working that out is one of the first things we do.
When No Settlement Offer Came, We Took the Case to TrialIn Patzer v. Portland Adventist Medical Center, a patient in the hospital’s care fell and suffered a traumatic brain injury. The defense offered nothing before trial, so we tried the case. The jury returned $2,225,000, and the result was later listed among TopVerdict.com’s Top 100 medical malpractice verdicts in the United States for 2019. Was a fall in a hospital written off as an accident nobody could have prevented? Bring us the chart. The risk assessment, the rounding log, and the staffing record for that shift usually settle the question. Call (503) 953-8224 and our staff will take the details. |
What a Lake Oswego Malpractice Claim Can Recover
The compensation in a malpractice claim is meant to cover what the injury cost you and what it will keep costing you. Oregon splits it into economic damages, the losses that come with a receipt, and non-economic damages, the ones that do not. That usually includes:
- Medical bills already paid, including the treatment needed to fix the original harm
- The cost of future care, therapy, and equipment
- Income you have lost, and earning capacity you will not get back
- Pain, disability, and the parts of your life the injury took away
Oregon does not cap that last category for a patient who survives. The opposite is repeated often enough that most people believe it. Oregon does have a $500,000 limit on non-economic damages, but it applies only to wrongful death claims, and it does not reach the pain and disability of a patient who is still here.
How Long You Have to File a Malpractice Claim in Lake Oswego, Oregon
Two years from the day you discovered the injury, and no more than five years from the treatment itself. The five-year limit is the one that catches people, because it does not wait for you to find out what happened.
| Your situation | The deadline | What starts the clock |
|---|---|---|
| Most malpractice claims | 2 years | The day you discovered the injury |
| Every malpractice claim | 5 years, a statute of repose | The date of the treatment or operation |
| The patient is a child | Still 5 years | A child’s age does not extend it |
| A public body was involved | 180 days to give notice, or 1 year if the claim is for a death | Shorter than every row above it |
| The provider concealed the error | 2 years from discovering the concealment | Fraud, deceit or a misleading representation |
That third row matters most in birth injury cases. Harm done during delivery is sometimes not understood until a child misses developmental milestones years later, and Oregon law is clear that a minor’s age does not extend the five-year limit.
If the care came from a public body, notice has to be given within 180 days, or one year if the claim is for a death. Care at a VA hospital runs on a separate federal track with its own deadlines.
The five-year limit has one exception. Where the provider’s own fraud, deceit or misleading representation is the reason no claim was filed in time, the clock runs two years from the day that concealment came to light. Outside that, a malpractice lawsuit filed after five years is very unlikely to survive, whatever the records show.
If you are near either deadline, call today rather than next week. Reach us at (503) 953-8224.
If You Lost Someone to Medical Malpractice
A wrongful death claim differs from an injury claim in two ways that matter early. It is brought by the personal representative of the estate rather than by family members in their own names, so someone has to be appointed first. The deadline is three years, and it can be cut shorter by the same five-year limit that runs from the treatment.
In a wrongful death case Oregon does apply a $500,000 limit to non-economic damages. Claims against public bodies run under a different set of rules. We have brought these claims against a state agency and against a jail that denied a detainee medical care.
The Attorney Who Will Handle Your Case
A hospital defends these claims with a risk management department and a malpractice insurer that see them every week. Patrick D. Angel has taken one of these cases to verdict rather than settling it.
The caseload stays small for a reason. A medical claim turns on a careful read of a long record, and that reading does not delegate well. Once we take your case, he is the one preparing it, and the one standing up at trial if it goes there.
“”a kind heart, but is also a gentleman as well as a professional bulldog in the courtroom””
Jamie Ritterhouse, Google review
Our Medical Malpractice Results
| Result | Type | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| $5,500,000 | Settlement | A jail detainee died after the defendants failed to provide necessary medical care |
| $5,000,000 | Settlement | Portland VA Hospital missed the risk of a pulmonary embolism during surgery, causing a spinal cord injury and partial paralysis |
| $2,225,000 | Jury verdict | A hospital patient fell and suffered a traumatic brain injury. No settlement offer was made |
| $850,000 | Settlement | A flesh-eating infection after abdominal surgery was missed |
| $300,000 | Settlement | A hospital failed to help a high fall-risk patient to the bathroom, and the fall caused a brain bleed |
Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case turns on its own facts.
Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
The rest of our verdicts and settlements are listed together.
If your own records look anything like the rows above, we want to see them. What compensation a claim supports depends on the record, not on the size of the hospital. Bring us yours on (503) 953-8224.
Questions We Get Asked Most
How Much Does a Medical Malpractice Lawyer Cost?
Nothing up front, and no fee unless we recover money for you. Our fee comes out of the recovery rather than out of your pocket. In a medical claim the work starts before anyone knows whether a claim exists, because an independent physician has to review the chart first. How our fees work is set out in full. The consultation is free and commits you to nothing.
What Is the Hardest Part of a Medical Malpractice Case to Prove?
Causation. Showing the care fell below the standard is often straightforward, because the record either shows the assessment was done or it does not. The harder task is proving that failure caused the harm, rather than the illness the patient already had. This is why these cases turn on the medical expert, and why the chart usually decides the outcome long before anyone discusses settlement.
Can I Still Sue If I Signed a Consent Form?
Often, yes. Signing a form is not the same as being told what you were agreeing to, and Oregon treats informed consent as a conversation rather than a signature. The physician has to explain the treatment, say that alternatives and risks exist, then ask whether you want a fuller explanation. If that conversation never happened, the consent form can become part of the claim.
How Do I Find Out If My Doctor Has Been Disciplined?
Start with the Oregon Medical Board, which licenses physicians in this state and maintains the public record of its licensees. A disciplinary record does not prove malpractice in your case, and a clean record does not prove your care was adequate. Treat it as background rather than evidence, and there is a fuller walkthrough of looking up a doctor’s malpractice history on our blog.
Talk to a Lake Oswego Medical Malpractice Lawyer
Tell us what happened. Call (503) 953-8224 and our staff will take the details of your medical malpractice case. Bringing a medical negligence claim starts with someone reading your records properly, and if it is one we can help with, we will arrange a time for you to talk it through with Patrick Angel. We act for injured patients across Lake Oswego and the surrounding area. The consultation is free, confidential and there is no obligation either way.
Angel Law, P.C.
385 1st Street, Suite 215
Lake Oswego, OR 97034
If you cannot come to us, we will come to you. You can also tell us what happened in writing.