When you face nursing license disciplinary charges, you take on considerable professional, personal, and financial risks. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Your best move is to call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now to retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team for the skilled and experienced attorney representation you need for your best licensing outcome. But you may wonder whether the risk of your disciplinary charges justifies the cost of our strategic and effective attorney defense services. This FAQ addresses that important question.
How High Are the Stakes of My License Discipline?
High. And that's exactly the right question when considering the cost of our attorney license defense. Whenever you face a significant risk, you should first count the size or cost of that risk before determining how to responsibly address and minimize it. One of the biggest errors that a nurse or other licensed professional can make is to fail to consider the risks. You wouldn't, for instance, enter a high-risk nursing field without adequate malpractice insurance, at least not if you want to avoid the large civil liability risk.
The same is true of the nursing license discipline. The notice of your state nursing board's disciplinary charges means that the board's disciplinary officials believe that the complaint lodged against you is sufficiently credible to require you to respond. The board's investigators may already have interviewed the complainant and gathered documentation confirming the complainant's incriminating account. The risk you thus face is that your state nursing board will suspend or revoke your license, ending your nursing practice unless and until you gain license reinstatement. See, for example, the North Carolina Board of Nursing's long list of disciplinary action reports, including innumerable license suspensions.
In short, your stakes in your license disciplinary proceeding are losing everything for which you've worked in your nursing studies and practice. In particular, losing your nursing license can carry professional, financial, and personal costs, each addressed in answers to the following three questions.
What Are License Discipline's Professional Costs?
The professional costs of nursing license discipline begin with your nursing employment. If you suffer nursing license suspension or revocation, your employer must terminate your nursing practice employment. Your employer may or may not be willing to move you into a non-practice position, but even if so, that position is unlikely to provide the same professional advantages as your nursing practice employment.
If you lose your current nursing employment to license discipline, you won't likely get other nursing employment unless and until you gain license reinstatement. Employers must not employ unlicensed nurses or nurses with suspended or revoked licenses, on penalty of the employer's own license sanction. For instance, California Business & Professions Code Section 2725.3 makes it unlawful for a facility to retain an unlicensed nurse to perform nursing functions. That restriction is why employers check nursing licenses before hiring. You may thus lose not only your nursing job but also your nursing career for the foreseeable future, conditioned on license reinstatement.
Loss of nursing employment is not your only professional cost. Your license discipline could also lose the support of your professional network, including colleague nurses, supervisors, subordinates, physicians, and other health professionals. You may simultaneously lose references and recommendations for other healthcare employment. You may, in short, become an outcast or pariah within the professional community on which you previously depended. All that loss more than justifies our attorney defense cost.
What Are License Discipline's Financial Costs?
Your financial costs of nursing license discipline may be much greater than you at first realize. The above description of professional costs describes the risk of lost nursing employment and the potential loss of your entire nursing career. You can roughly calculate the present value of that future career. Depending on your nursing level, earnings, and work life expectancy, that value may run into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, especially when considering the value of benefits attached to employment. Benefit values can increase by 25%, 30%, or more the value of your wages. Don't underestimate the cost of your lost earnings and earning capacity, together with the pay raises you anticipated from advancement and promotion.
Loss of your nursing license and employment can carry other financial costs having to do with your potential inability to maintain your other financial obligations. If you are unable to gain equivalent employment outside of the nursing field, and you do not have a spouse or other household member on whom you can rely for replacement income, you may be unable to carry educational loans, home mortgage loans, vehicle loans, credit card obligations, and other current financial obligations. Not to be too severe, but bankruptcy and wholesale changes in your personal balance sheet may be in the offing. The cost of our attorneys' skilled and experienced defense services pale in comparison to those potential financial losses.
What Are License Discipline's Personal Costs?
Nursing license discipline also carries serious potential personal costs. Changing careers isn't always a loss, especially when a professional chooses to pursue another vocation more fitting to the professional's personality, skills, needs, and preferences. But you won't have chosen another career if you lose your nursing license to disciplinary charges. Your state nursing board will instead have forced you to find another career when nursing was clearly the career you chose and into which you invested heavily through your nursing education, examination, and experience.
So, what are the personal costs of losing a nursing career? One large cost is the loss of everything you drew, mentally and emotionally, from caring so compassionately, skillfully, sensitively, and intimately for others. Having a precious life's work like nursing can mean so much more than the income the work produces. It can mean living a purposeful, engaged, and satisfying life, giving you the best reason to get up and get going each morning.
Losing your nursing license and employment can also affect your personal relationships, including the trust, confidence, and esteem in which your closest family members and friends hold you. Don't underestimate those personal impacts when balancing the cost of nursing license discipline against the cost and value of our attorneys' skilled and experienced services.
Are Attorney Costs Less than Discipline Risks?
It may seem too self-serving for us to say yes, but the discipline risks far outweigh the cost of our services. However, the above discussion shows how obvious, sound, and true that conclusion is. When you put everything on the license discipline side of the scale and then put the cost of our services on the other side of the scale, you should immediately recognize that your far greater cost of license discipline justifies the far lesser cost of our services.
The best evidence of that conclusion is that our attorneys have helped hundreds of nurses and other professionals nationwide with successful professional license defense. We would not have been able to accomplish all that good work if our nurse and other professional clients had not wisely trusted us with their license defense. The fact that nurses and other professional clients continue to hire us for their strategic and effective defense confirms the continuing value of our services.
How Does Attorney Defense Reduce Discipline Risk?
Of course, for our services to have that value, they must also make a difference by reducing, minimizing, or, if possible, eliminating your nursing license discipline risk. And our services do make substantial differences. Administrative license defense is complex, involving professional standards, agency laws and rules, and administrative procedures, effectively three different bodies of law and practice. Even as a wise, skilled, and knowledgeable nurse, you do not have the comprehensive knowledge, skills, and experience to handle your own nursing license defense. For just one example, you likely don't know the remedial measures your state nursing board officials may accept in lieu of punitive sanctions in your particular case. We do. And we can use that knowledge to skillfully advocate and negotiate for remedial relief, potentially avoiding any disciplinary finding or sanctions, leaving your professional license, reputation, and relationships wholly intact. That is your reasonable goal. We are here for you, with the knowledge, skills, and experience to pursue your goal to the best effect.
What Do I Get for My Attorney Fees?
When you retain us, we promptly notify your state nursing board's disciplinary officials of our appearance on your behalf. That one action relieves you of the concern over communicating timely and appropriately with those officials. We can do so for you, answering the disciplinary charges while strategically asserting your procedural rights. We can simultaneously help you identify, acquire, and present your exonerating and mitigating evidence, both in early conciliation conferences we arrange and, if necessary, at a later formal hearing on the charges.
Your state nursing board must generally offer you fair notice and a fair hearing to satisfy your constitutional due process rights. State nursing practice acts routinely do require those protective procedures, before disciplinary officials may impose license discipline. For example, Section 45:11-24.8 of New Jersey's Nurse Practice Act incorporates the procedural protections of the state's Administrative Procedure Act. At the formal hearing, we can not only present your testimony, the testimony of your supporting witnesses, and your documentary defense evidence, but we can also cross-examine the board's adverse witnesses and challenge the board's incriminating documentary evidence. If you have already lost your formal hearing, we can take the available appeals and seek permitted civil court review, for reversal of erroneous decisions.
But most of all, when you retain us, you get peace of mind. You get the assurance that you are doing your level best to retain your nursing license, practice, employment, and career.
Should I Skimp on Attorney Fees?
Do not skimp on attorney costs by hiring an unqualified local criminal defense counsel, civil litigation attorney, or transactional lawyer. The little you may save may cost you far more in risks and outcomes involving crippling license sanctions. When disciplinary officials serve notice of charges, they often go in presuming that their charges warrant a license suspension. The appearance of unqualified local counsel acting on your behalf won't impress those disciplinary officials. Quite the opposite. Your unfortunate retention of unqualified local counsel may signal to disciplinary officials that you are throwing in the proverbial towel, expecting license suspension. Unqualified defense representation can make your situation worse, not better, by stiffening the resolve of disciplinary officials to pursue their charges to the point of a license suspension. Don't skimp on attorney costs. Doing so can cripple your defense and lead to a disciplinary outcome significantly worse than you could achieve.
Is It Too Late for Me to Hire You?
No, it is likely not too late for you to retain our attorneys. Our defense services generally work best when the nurse or other professional facing disciplinary charges retains us in the course of the disciplinary investigation, or if not, then at least before the formal hearing. But if you have already lost your formal hearing, your state's administrative procedures may offer you another substantial opportunity to appeal your adverse decision to a higher administrative official, panel of officials, or the full state nursing board. Depending on your state's procedures, your appeal may even be the substantial equivalent of a second hearing, a second bite at the proverbial apple. And even if you have lost your appeal, we may be able to obtain civil court review and reversal.
Premier License Defense Attorneys Available
If you face nursing license disciplinary charges, call 888.535.3686 or complete this contact form now to retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Professional License Defense Team. Our attorneys have helped hundreds of nurses and other professionals nationwide defend all kinds of state licensing board disciplinary charges, showing the value of our services. You need our skilled and experienced defense representation for your best disciplinary outcome.
