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In most cases you have one year from the date you discovered - or reasonably should have discovered - both the injury and that it was negligently caused, or three years from the date of the injury itself, whichever comes first.

Because the discovery rule usually controls, the practical deadline is one year, and simply knowing that something went wrong is not enough; you must have reason to connect the injury to negligence.

Some situations pause the clock, including active concealment, a continuing course of treatment, or an injury you had no way to discover.

Minors generally get three years, birth-injury children six (sometimes eight), and a claim against a public hospital requires a government claim within six months.

Never wait until the deadline - filing two to three months early is essential.

MICRA (the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act) caps only non-economic damages - pain, suffering and loss of enjoyment of life - in cases of a licensed provider’s professional negligence.

Economic damages such as medical care, lost earnings and lifetime attendant care are never capped.

The historic cap was $250,000; the 2023 reform replaced it with caps that rise every year on separate tracks for injury and death cases.

Two features matter enormously: the cap can be multiplied through “buckets” (broadly, the physician, the facility, and an unconnected wrongdoer), and it can be avoided altogether where the conduct is reckless, intentional, fraudulent, a battery from improper consent, or committed by an entity that is not a qualified provider (such as an HMO).

An experienced firm gets outside MICRA far more often than the field average.

Reputable medical malpractice attorneys work purely on contingency: you pay nothing up front, the firm advances the case costs - often well over $200,000 through trial - and a fee is earned only if you recover.

Any lawyer willing to take a med-mal case on an hourly basis is signaling either that they doubt the case or that they do not really do this work.

Under MICRA the contingency percentages are capped and lower than ordinary personal injury - roughly 25–33% depending on when the case resolves, versus about 40% for non-MICRA cases.

There is no meaningful “average.” Value is driven by three things: how provable the wrongdoing and liability are, how egregious the wrongdoing is, and the size of the economic losses - especially lost earnings and future care - for those entitled to recover.

Two cases with the same diagnosis can be worth vastly different amounts depending on proof and provable damages.

Because MICRA can cap non-economic damages and the litigation is expensive, cases with little or no economic loss (an elderly patient, a child, or a death with no future-care claim) can be economically hard to pursue even when the care was plainly negligent - a major reason strong claims are still turned away.