Pagination of medical records at times can be quite uninspiring, especially if your a lawyer with little or no medical training. However, it’s not all, sorting through endless, repetitive data found in nursing records and observation charts or ensuring all pages of the records are number stamped and run consecutively. There are interesting and challenging bits thrown in when you come to review the case and prepare the chronology with the satisfaction of knowing you have saved your client’s time and money on the way.

It may be a laborious process at times and involves a mixture of the purely administrative (numbering the bundle for example) to the very skilled (analyzing the records and identifying the salient case points). Knowing that the final product will be used throughout the lifetime of the case, and will be used and referred to by respected medical experts and reviewed by a senior member of the judiciary at Trial, it is absolutely vital that it is accurate.

The administrative part of the process nevertheless involves significant skill and requires experience. The process has to be consistent in preparation. As it’s said, “Practice makes perfect”. As one prepares more bundles of notes, one gets faster and more adept at completing the administrative tasks. Accuracy increases, as does speed which obviously is beneficial for all concerned. Not only this, but as a consequence of the increased speed, costs are reduced and efficiency increased.

This is one of the primary reason Professional Pagination Services came into being; to provide an efficient and cost effective service to the already overstretched clinical negligence solicitor.

Professional Paginating Services can also save clinical negligence firms time and money. Costs in clinical negligence cases are front loaded and even before an opinion from an expert confirms whether a case has prospects of success, a disbursement is incurred of several hundred pounds in the form of pagination of the medical records.

However the pagination fee will save substantially more costs in the lifetime of the case. In cases that fail early, it is imperative that costs are kept as low as possible as these need to be written off either by the law firm, client or the ATE insurer. But even with such early failures, the pagination is going to have saved a lot of money. The paginated bundle and chronology may have shown that the case obviously has no prospects, thus avoiding an expert fee altogether. Alternatively, if an expert is instructed, but gives a negative opinion on prospects of the case, their fee is likely to be around half the level it would have been had they been asked to review an un-paginated bundle. So at the very worst, the cost of pagination can be considered neutral and therefore the real costs of instructing Professional Paginating Services in cases that are discontinued is nil.

In cases that proceed, every pair of eyes that reviews the paginated bundle will be very expensive. Whether it is solicitors, counsel, experts or the presiding judge. Imagine if they were having to review an un-paginated or a poorly paginated bundle, perhaps compiled in house by an inexperienced junior lawyer. It would take a huge amount of extra time and incur huge extra cost, which would be avoided by instructing Professional Paginating Services from the outset.

Working with medical records on a daily basis means that, when it comes to paginating bundles and preparing chronologies we probably have more experience of the variety of cases taken on than most practicing clinical negligence solicitors.

Using Professional Paginating Services as an external provider means that there are no issues of staff sickness or holidays and no fixed overheads if numbers of new cases should decline for a period for any reason. Moreover using Professional Paginating Services means that, should the law firm wish to do so, the fee can be considered to be a disbursement and be recoverable in the event of failure, an option not available where the process is done in-house.

With fixed fees on the way the benefits of having the medical records paginated externally will be even greater. It will be more important than ever that cases with no, or borderline prospects of success are not pursued so as to avoid wasting costs on very tight margins. An external review of the case at an early stage will be even more beneficial as a result.

Utilizing Professional Paginating Services will also mean that bundles are prepared as efficiently as possible, which will again be vital where margins across the board are lower. It would also be a false economy to dispense with medical records pagination in an attempt to save costs, as the fees saved would be swamped by those subsequently incurred in reviewing an un-paginated bundle.

Finally, in the future era of lower fees in clinical negligence, fixed overheads are likely to become more problematic as the sector gets used to lower fees, and potentially fewer cases taken on that no longer justify an in-house department. Therefore the benefits of outsourcing medical records pagination with no fixed contract and the flexibility to only send the work you have, will be of tremendous benefit to law firms as they readjust their business plans for the clinical negligence department in advance of, and upon arrival of, fixed fees.

For more information on Professional Paginating Services, fixed fees and extended credit terms please don’t hesitate to;

call us on 01495 370288

or email info@professionalpaginatingservices.co.uk

or visit our website https://www.professionalpaginatingservices.co.uk