What You Can Expect When You Call
Reaching out doesn’t commit you to anything. It starts with a conversation about what your family experienced, including the symptoms, the timeline, the hospital visits, and any records or memories you have. From there, our team gathers the full medical record and brings in independent medical experts to review it.
That review has one job: to compare the care your loved one received against what a reasonable provider would have done under the same circumstances. It’s a medical question first, not a legal one. The experts look at when symptoms appeared, how they were assessed, what imaging was or wasn’t ordered, and whether a neurology consult happened when it should have.
It’s worth saying plainly: this kind of review sometimes shows that providers acted appropriately despite a devastating outcome. Stroke care is genuinely difficult, and not every bad result is the product of an error. If that’s what the review finds, you still walk away knowing, which, for a lot of families, is worth something on its own. There’s no obligation to move forward either way.
Our Process
We guide you through every step with clear communication and compassionate support.
Free Consultation
Call us anytime to discuss your case. We listen carefully and answer all your questions with no obligation.
Medical Review
Our team conducts a thorough investigation with qualified medical experts to determine if malpractice occurred.
Legal Action
If we find evidence of negligence, we build a strong case and handle all legal aspects on your behalf.
Secure Recovery
We fight to secure the financial resources your family needs for long-term care and peace of mind.
Where Stroke Care Goes Wrong
Stroke is one of the more commonly missed emergency diagnoses, and the reasons tend to repeat across cases.
Symptoms get attributed to migraines, vertigo, intoxication, or anxiety. Strokes involving the brainstem are especially easy to miss because they don’t always produce the specific symptoms most people associate with stroke; instead, a patient might present with dizziness, double vision, or trouble speaking, none of which scream “stroke” to an untrained eye. Imaging gets delayed, or isn’t ordered at all. A patient is discharged with instructions to follow up, and the window for effective treatment closes.
New Jersey’s Stroke System Is Built in Tiers
New Jersey organizes its hospitals into a tiered system for stroke response:
- Acute Stroke Ready Hospitals
- Primary Stroke Centers
- Thrombectomy-Capable Stroke Centers
- Comprehensive Stroke Centers
Each carries different capabilities, and each is required to hold national certification. When a stroke presents at a smaller or less-equipped facility, the decision about whether to transfer, and how quickly, becomes part of the story. A delay at that decision point is one of the more common threads in the cases our medical reviewers examine.
When a stroke is missed or its treatment delayed, the range of outcomes is wide:
- Some patients recover with manageable disability.
- Others face permanent and severe impairment.
- In the most catastrophic cases, a patient is left with locked-in syndrome, in which they are fully aware but almost entirely unable to move or speak, or they don’t survive.
Where a case falls on that spectrum can have everything to do with how quickly the stroke was recognized and treated.
Speed matters here too, in a way that’s measurable. When a stroke patient needs to be transferred from one hospital to another for advanced treatment like thrombectomy, researchers track what’s called “door-in-door-out,” or DIDO, time, i.e., how long a patient stays at the first hospital before being sent on. The DIDO guideline from the Joint Commission and the Brain Attack Coalition is less than 120 minutes.
National research published in JAMA found New Jersey’s median DIDO time was:
- 126 to 131 minutes for acute ischemic stroke eligible for endovascular therapy
- 194 to 215 minutes for other acute ischemic stroke
Every extra minute in that window translates to lost neurons and a worse potential outcome. It’s exactly the kind of data our medical reviewers pull when examining a specific case, alongside the patient’s own chart.
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What This Often Means Financially
Families dealing with a severe or permanent outcome are usually facing decisions about long-term care sooner than they expected, and New Jersey is an expensive place to need it.
| Type of Care | Estimated Cost in New Jersey |
| Private duty nurse (hourly rate) | $105/hour |
| Private duty nurse (visit rate) | $150/visit |
| Long-term care facility, e.g., nursing home (semi-private room) | $153,300/year |
| Long-term care facility, e.g., nursing home (private room) | $173,375/year |
Source: Genworth
If the Review Points to a Preventable Delay
If the medical review finds that care fell short of what was reasonable, the next step is figuring out who that responsibility belongs to. Sometimes it traces to a single physician’s judgment call. Other times it’s broader and could include an emergency department’s protocols, a hospital system’s staffing or transfer practices, or some combination of providers and facilities. Multiple parties can share responsibility for the same gap in care.
If we determine that a preventable mistake occurred, you can use that information to find closure, or we can help you take legal action.
From there, a legal case is built around what the experts found:
- What the standard of care required
- Where it wasn’t met
- What that departure caused
The goal isn’t punishment. It’s making sure your family has the resources to manage what comes next.
If you’re at this stage, we recommend putting the following in a safe place, before they’re harder to track down:
- Complete medical records and imaging (discs or digital files, not just reports)
- Discharge paperwork
- A written timeline of what happened and when
- Any notes from conversations with providers along the way
None of this needs to be perfect or complete; whatever you have is a useful starting point.
Why You Can Trust Our Team with Your Family’s Case
We start every case the same way: by learning your story. Before anything else happens, we want to understand what your family actually experienced, in your own words, without rushing to conclusions.
From there, we coordinate the medical review with independent experts who have real experience evaluating stroke and catastrophic injury cases. Throughout the process, you have direct access to your attorney, so you’ll always know what is happening with your case. We intentionally keep our caseload limited so that it doesn’t become an empty promise. You stay informed, and you stay in control of the decisions that matter.
We work on a contingency basis; there are no fees unless we recover compensation for your family.
Start With a Conversation, Not a Commitment
If you’re still trying to understand what happened to your loved one, that’s exactly where this process is meant to begin. A consultation with our team is free, confidential, and comes with no obligation to take things further. Newsome Law is here to help you get answers; what you do with them afterward is entirely up to you.
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