What a Bad Medical Malpractice Case Actually Costs: The Full Number

Let us talk about what a bad med mal case actually costs a plaintiff attorney. Not the expert fee. The whole number.

The Line Items Nobody Adds Up

Expert retention: $8,000 to $15,000. Record retrieval: $500 to $2,000. Deposition transcripts: $1,500 to $4,000. Attorney time across 18 months of case development: conservatively 60 to 100 hours at whatever your effective hourly value is. Paralegal and staff time: another 30 to 50 hours. Client management on a matter that is going nowhere: incalculable in the practical sense.

All of it on contingency. All of it unrecoverable if the case does not resolve.

The Real Number

A single bad med mal retain that runs through discovery before you recognize the medicine will not hold up can cost a small plaintiff firm $30,000 to $50,000 in hard and soft costs combined.

That is not a hypothetical. That is a number attorneys in this space absorb regularly and rarely say out loud, because it is embarrassing and because everyone else is doing it the same way.

What Changes When Screening Is Part of Intake

The attorneys who have built pre-litigation clinical screening into their practice describe the same shift: they take fewer cases and make more money. Not because they got better at law. Because they stopped funding the cost of discovering no merit through retained experts on cases that never had a clinical foundation.

One thousand dollars at intake to know what you have before you commit. That is the math. Run it against your last 24 months and the conversation ends there.

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