Our Experienced Birth Injury Malpractice Team

At BirthInjuryAdvocate.com, our dedicated medical malpractice lawyers are committed to providing families with the support they so rarely find from doctors, nurses and hospitals.

After a serious birth injury has occurred, few physicians are willing to admit a mistake. Insurance companies can seem uncaring, more interested in saving their own money than compensating families during their time of need. Many parents feel like they have nowhere to turn.

Birth Injury Lawyers: Fighting For Injured Children

Caring for an injured child is a challenge. It’s the most rewarding, worthwhile challenge in the world, but difficult all the same. Many birth injuries sustained during labor or delivery will have life-long consequences, and some children are left with severe impairments.

Providing long-term support for a child, and ensuring they can live to their fullest potential, is every parent’s goal. But meeting that goal can be especially hard for the parents of children with neurological disorders, sensory impairments or cognitive disabilities.

Pursuing a lawsuit for medical negligence is a challenge in itself. We’ve met with hundreds of families who are certain that a doctor’s careless mistake, or failure to diagnose, caused their child irreparable harm. But even these parents are hesitant to pursue legal action. It’s true. Filing a lawsuit is a major decision, one that can’t be taken lightly.

Meet Our Medical Negligence Attorneys

BirthInjuryAdvocate.com is sponsored by an alliance of experienced personal injury lawyers devoted to protecting the rights – and improving the lives – of children harmed by medical negligence. Our goal is to ensure that every family receives the emotional and financial support they need to live long, healthy lives.

Laurence Banville, Esq.

Laurence Banville, Esq. is the founder and managing partner at Banville Law, a personal injury firm in New York dedicated to expanding access to experienced legal representation. Laurence serves as the coordinator for our alliance of attorneys and is one of the lead sponsors here at BirthInjuryAdvocate.com.

Laurence earned his law degree in Ireland, graduating from University College Dublin with a GPA equivalent of 4.0 and President’s honors. After moving to the US, Laurence spent several years defending asbestos manufacturers from personal injury actions. Working as a corporate defense attorney honed Laurence’s understanding of the tactics major defendants employ to deny responsibility. In founding the personal injury firm Banville Law, he marshaled his deep knowledge of defense practice to protect the rights of plaintiffs – people who have been injured or killed due to the negligence of others.

Laurence Banville is licensed to practice law in the State of New York. He is an active member of the Irish American community and has been recognized by Irish Legal 100 as one of the top young attorneys of Irish descent working in the US today.

Did Medical Malpractice Cause Our Child’s Injury?

Not every family will be entitled to file a birth injury lawsuit. Labor and delivery are complex, both as biological processes and medical situations. Thankfully, most childbirths are relatively complication-free. Medical science has come a long way. Still, some children sustain injuries during delivery. Some kids get hurt.

While every birth injury is traumatic, and countless children sustain real harm in delivery rooms across the country, they aren’t always adequate grounds for a medical negligence lawsuit. Lawsuits become possible in cases where an infant’s injuries were caused by the negligence of a healthcare professional.

Every pregnancy deserves competent medical care. We expect obstetricians, nurses and midwives to uphold certain standards of their profession and, under federal and state law, we can also demand that of them. When healthcare workers violate their industry’s standard of care – making irresponsible errors or failing to intervene appropriately in emergency situations – they can be held accountable in a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Does Our Family Have A Birth Injury Lawsuit?

Before assessing your family’s case in detail, we can’t provide you with an answer to that question. Only after reviewing the medical records, and consulting with independent medical experts, will it be possible to identify potentially negligent acts that impacted your child’s health.

With that being said, we can point out some of the most common birth injuries suffered during labor and delivery – many of which can be caused by a healthcare professional’s negligence:

• Cerebral Palsy – a family of neuromuscular disorders that impact movement, balance and coordination
• Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy – a brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation and loss of blood flow that frequently results in severe cognitive impairments and disorders like cerebral palsy
• Brachial Plexus Injuries – damage to the brachial plexus, a network of nerves that controls the arms and hands, is often sustained during difficult, traumatic deliveries. Erb’s Palsy, a disorder marked by weakness and paralysis, is one possible result.
• Forceps & Vacuum Extraction Injuries – While birth-assistive devices can be a reasonable choice under certain circumstances, these tools can also harm infants when used without proper care.
• Failures To Treat – Neonatal conditions like jaundice can be effectively treated, preventing long-term harm to a baby. But without appropriate intervention, these conditions can progress rapidly, leaving children with severe impairments. Many common maternal health conditions, like preeclampsia, can also come to threaten a baby’s health without proper diagnosis and treatment.
• Wrongful Death – In some tragic cases, infants die during or shortly after delivery. This is something no parent should have to go through, and when a child’s death is the result of medical malpractice, it’s nothing less than a moral outrage.

It should be noted that children are not the only people who can be harmed by birth malpractice. Thousands of women suffer severe injuries during labor and delivery – often due to negligence. When children and mothers are injured by incompetent healthcare professionals, families have every right to pursue justice – and compensation – in a court of law.

What Compensation Can We Recover In A Lawsuit?

Every birth injury lawsuit is different, and the particular types of compensation you pursue will depend almost exclusively on the individual factors of your case. In the vast majority of cases, families secure compensation to cover:

• Past, present and future costs of medical expenses associated with the child’s injuries
• Expenses for therapy, counseling and rehabilitation
• Money to cover a child’s physical pain and traumatic experience
• “Non-economic” damages intended to compensate children and parents for their pain and suffering
• Lost wages in the event that a parent was forced to quit a job or work fewer hours to care for their child
• Special education services and in-home care
• Home modifications

Punitive damages, although less frequently awarded than the damages we listed above, are also possible. Rather than compensating children and families for a specific loss, punitive damages are intended to punish a particularly reckless healthcare professional and deter future negligence.

Won’t Filing A Lawsuit Be Expensive?

At bottom, our goal is to discover the truth. What really happened in the delivery room? Who should be held accountable for a child’s birth injuries? Could all of this have been prevented – if only a doctor or nurse had communicated properly, used more care or noticed a troubling symptom earlier? That’s our job, and we don’t think any family should be barred from finding answers to these questions by financial concerns.

That’s why our experienced birth injury malpractice lawyers only work on a contingency-fee basis. That means you pay us nothing until we recover compensation in your case. Learning more about your legal options comes at no charge, too. Just call us today, or fill out our online contact form, to speak with an attorney now in a free consultation.