Pediatric Sepsis and the Path to Medical Malpractice
Carl-Erich Kruse
April 21, 2026
child in hospital bed smiling with two nurses
If you or a loved one has suffered catastrophic harm due to a medical error, your family is already suffering from the stress related to it. CMG Law has been helping people like you pursue medical malpractice claims for over 40 years. With our experienced and accessible attorneys and staff, we use a team approach to lessen your burden through the entire process. Give us a call today for a free consultation and see if we are right for you. Medical Malpractice Attorneys Seattle Washington
Anywhere in Washington State. Although our office is in Seattle, we help injured patients all over the State of Washington and beyond. This includes places like Bellevue, Redmond, Lynnwood, Tacoma, Bellingham, Everett, Spokane, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, and Vancouver. Whether you are in Whatcom County or Clark County, Grays Harbor or Spokane County, our firm has the strength and skill to assess your claim and counsel you regarding your legal options. We also represent out-of-state patients injured by medical care in Washington state.
We limit our practice to claims related to medical care, period. That includes medical negligence and malpractice in Washington State. Our practice is as broad as the medical profession: if you believe a health care provider has acted wrongfully and caused you harm, we can help you understand your rights and determine if you have a claim that can be pursued.
Here are a few of the practice areas in which we most often represent injured patients.
More About CMG LAWMost medical malpractice claims are complex, expensive, and risky, and many lawyers do not handle them. CMG Law, which was founded in 1980, limits its practice to such cases. The CMG Law team has decades of experience in prosecuting medical malpractice cases. Our lawyers have successfully resolved cases ranging from birth injuries to wrongful death. Case reports of some of the cases we have handled over the years can be seen in the “Cases We Handle” part of this website.
child in hospital bed smiling with two nurses
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patient in hospital bed surrounded by three nurses
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Medical malpractice cases require expert medical testimony, often from different experts on negligence, causation, and damages. CMG Law works with top medical experts throughout the country to present the evidence needed to win. We have the resources to ensure that your claim will have the best chance of being resolved in your favor.
CMG Law knows that this is your case and you have the right to make decisions about resolution. Our team of experienced attorneys and staff regularly communicate with our clients to ensure that they have the information to make the best decisions about their case.
1. Preliminary EvaluationAn attorney in our office will make a preliminary assessment of your claim, based on information provided to us by you or a referring lawyer. Often, for various reasons, a decision is made at this stage not to proceed further with a claim. Those reasons may include a potential conflict of interest — for example where the potential defendant in your claim is a doctor for other clients or is an expert witness in one of our cases — or the provable damages are not extensive enough to justify the risks and costs of pursuing the claim.
Establishing liability or fault depends, in most cases, on what is in the medical records. In the second stage of the evaluation process, we will send for copies of the relevant records. It may take as long as four weeks or more to obtain them.
The initial review of the records will be done by an attorney in our office. Depending on the volume of records and the complexity of the case, the review may take several weeks to complete. One of our attorneys specializes in such reviews and prepares extensive chronologies of the care in question.
The next stage is evaluation by an appropriate expert doctor. Usually, the issue of negligence must be evaluated by someone in the same field, i.e., a surgeon for surgical negligence, a nurse for nursing negligence, etc.
Sometimes, issues other than that of negligence must also be evaluated by an expert. For example, a different expert may be used to evaluate causation (whether and to what extent the negligence caused injury to the patient) or the extent of damages.
We work with many medical experts who have evaluated potential claims and testified in our cases, but in some instances we need to locate a particular expert with whom we have not previously worked on a case. This may involve contacting experts from different areas of the country who have written articles about the particular medical subject in Washington State.
We determine on the basis of our review process whether to proceed with the claim. Reasons for not proceeding may be problems in proving negligence, causation, or damages. Because of the complexity and cost of handling medical negligence cases, there must be a weighing of the risks and costs of pursuing a claim against the potential recovery from a settlement or verdict.
If the initial review indicates that this is a case which we would want to pursue, we will enter into a formal attorney-client relationship under the terms in a written retainer agreement providing for a contingent (percentage) fee. There is no fee if there is no recovery, and we advance the costs of the lawsuit (to be reimbursed at the time of resolution).