Celie Schilz
Legal Nurse Consultant

As a Legal Nurse Consultant, Celie Schilz works with law professionals to provide a variety of different services. She will often assist in medical malpractice cases, toxic torts, insurance fraud cases, personal injury cases, worker’s compensation cases, and criminal cases, among others.

One of her main responsibilities is to help lawyers gather and study evidence. She will often obtain medical records, for instance, which she can study for any information relevant to a court case or arbitration. She may, for example, compare a person’s medical records to allegations and decide whether or not a case has enough merit or evidence to justify a legal procedure. She can also examine a person’s medical charts for signs of tampering or malpractice. A person’s medical history also sometimes has merit during legal cases involving health issues. For example, a legal nurse consultant could find that a preexisting medical condition could be the cause of a serious medical problem, not medical malpractice.

Since law professionals were educated on the law and justice system instead of medicine, they will also usually need a legal nurse consultant to explain medical terms and procedures. The consultants will try to explain these sometimes difficult to understand terms and concepts in layman’s terms.

Legal nurse consultants might also be asked to find and interview witnesses for medical court cases as well. In some instances, a medical nurse consultant might be asked to act as an expert witness herself in order to explain medical jargon to judges and juries.