What is a Legal Nurse Consultant?

A legal nurse consultant (LNC) is a registered nurse who works in various settings. We may work in law firms, risk management, forensics, or for ourselves as independent contractors. Legal nurse consultants often work closely with medical malpractice and personal injury lawyers.

One former DA once told me, "It's easier to train a nurse to be a paralegal than it is to train a paralegal to be a nurse."

How Legal Nurse Consultants Add Value to Medical Malpractice Cases

Legal nurse consultants are registered nurses (RNs), often with many years of experience. We use our clinical knowledge and nuanced understanding of healthcare operations to support medical malpractice, wrongful death, and personal injury attorneys.

Navigating medical records without a trained guide can leave an attorney blindsided, as medical records are often messy, disorganized, or incomplete. LNCs can organize medical records, identify missing encounters, and offer guidance on relevant records to request during discovery.

Why ICU Nurses Make Great Legal Nurse Consultants

At CFS Consultants, we draw upon over 30 years of collective intensive care experience. You can read more about intensive care units (ICU) here.

ICU nurses have a well-deserved reputation for our borderline-pathological attention to detail. ICU patients tend to be far more medically fragile than patients elsewhere in the hospital. Therefore, ICU nurses must be vigilant; one missed critical lab value or unnoticed signs of neurological deterioration can yield disastrous consequences.

This vigilance and obsession with details translates well to legal applications. Our chief legal nurse, Cindy, once caught a medication error by a co-defendant facility that resulted in a plaintiff's permanent paralysis from the waist down. Hidden among over 12,000 pages of microscopic documentation was the smoking gun. Finding this one error led to her client being dismissed from the suit altogether. The problem isn't just finding the smoking gun; it's knowing where to look for it in the first place.

By providing essential insights into medical records, standards of care, and potential outcomes, legal nurse consultants can be valuable assets to any legal team.

Contact CFS Consultants today. Let's win your case, together.