What Should a Stockton Family Do If Their Child Suffered a Preventable Birth Injury? A Guide from our Experienced Birth Injury Team at The Child Injury Firm

A Life Care Plan is the single most important document for defining your child’s future needs. It is a comprehensive blueprint, created by a certified medical and vocational expert, that projects the full scope of your child’s medical and personal requirements for their entire life. It quantifies the costs of everything from future surgeries, medications, and therapies to in-home nursing care, specialized wheelchairs, adaptive vehicle and housing modifications, and educational support. This document transforms your child’s needs from an abstract idea into a concrete, defensible financial figure for the court.

A deposition is a standard and crucial part of any birth injury case. It is a formal interview where the hospital’s attorneys will ask you questions about the pregnancy, birth, and your child’s condition under oath. Yes, you will almost certainly have to give a deposition, but you will not go in unprepared or alone. Our attorneys will spend hours with you beforehand, practicing questions and ensuring you are comfortable and confident. We will be right beside you during the entire process to protect you from improper questions and guide you through it.

This is a very common and understandable question. It’s important to know that a civil lawsuit and a medical board action are two separate processes. Our lawsuit’s primary and sole purpose is to secure the financial compensation your family needs for your child’s lifetime of care. Disciplinary action against a doctor’s license is handled exclusively by the Medical Board of California. While a malpractice verdict can trigger a board investigation, the lawsuit itself is focused on providing for your child, not on professionally punishing the doctor.

You should not speak with the hospital’s risk management team, investigators, or lawyers without your own legal counsel present. The hospital’s goal in these meetings is to protect itself from liability. They are looking for information that could weaken your potential claim. Anything you say can be taken out of context and used against your family later. Their job is to minimize the hospital’s financial risk; our job is to maximize your child’s recovery and protect your rights.

No, absolutely not. While the “standard of care” is legally based on what a reasonably competent professional in the same circumstances would do, it does not create an excuse for fundamental negligence. Core patient safety rules—such as properly monitoring a baby’s heart rate, responding to clear signs of fetal distress, and managing well-known complications—are universally accepted medical principles. A doctor in Stockton is expected to be just as competent in these critical, life-saving areas as a doctor anywhere else in California.