A legal nurse consultant is nurse who has moved from the field of medicine to the field of law, bringing along a career in the medical field that provides medical expertise in the law office and courtroom. Lawyers have been using “expert witnesses” for years in personal injury and liability cases. These experts will testify to the nature of the injury, the extent of debilitation, and help put medical terminology into language a jury will understand. Legal nurse consultants have made a career of it.
Legal nurse consultants (LNCs) start out as nurses in a variety of clinical settings: medical-surgical nursing, emergency, quality assurance, obstetrics, and many others. During the course of exposure to countless cases of broken bones or common surgical procedures or various examination procedures such as angiograms and MRIs, the nurse will have developed a degree of expertise.
A legal nurse consultant often first puts this expertise to work by responding to an informal inquiry from an attorney or paralegal. One consulting opportunity leads to another, and the nurse finds that the consulting practice is filling too many hours to be a secondary job and holds promise.
Becoming a Full Time Legal Nurse Consultant
Many LNCs leave their nursing job when the legal consulting has developed critical mass and hang out a shingle. Often the LNC has a primary affiliation with a single lawyer or firm and will get most of the initial business through referrals. Other Legal Nurse Consultants will go on staff with a law firm, and become an in-house resource for all things medical.
This job can evolve into any number of roles. The LNC may begin by assisting an attorney in reviewing medical records, providing explanations for charted shorthand and procedures that may be unfamiliar to the attorney and essential to a particular case. If there are multiple lawyers involved, LNCs may find themselves in a conference room briefing legal staff on the medical intricacies of a case and presenting a report with multimedia imaging to support the verbiage.
Legal Nurse Consultants can become medical detectives, running down medical files on a particular case and interviewing medical personnel who may have been involved with treatment of the person involved in the suit.
Status and Certification of a Legal Nurse Consultant
The American Bar Association refuses to recognize Legal Nurse Consultants as a professional category unto themselves. The ABA prefers to look on them as paralegals, although they are beginning to generate some standards for these medical paralegals. There is general agreement that all Legal Nurse Consultants must be Registered Nurses. Those who wish to train for a career in the legal arena may choose from many continuing education programs that are offered by technical academies and online institutions which will provide and RN with the basics of the jurisprudence process, personal injury and liability law and other related legal topics.
At the end of the program, the newly graduated LNC will receive a certificate establishing successful completion of the program. The American Association of Legal Nurse Consultants does have a certification program complete with four hour exam. In order to qualify, you must be a licensed RN and have 2000 hours of legal consulting practice to your credit within the last three years.
