Over the last few years the frequency and severity of mishaps in medical practice and legal encounters triggered by malpractice suits have been heavily reported in the headlines and the media in general, indicating the tensions which arise when ethical trust between doctors (and other healthcare professionals) and patients breaks down and the legal mechanisms for responding to patient safety episodes in healthcare. By utilizing the tools the Internet provides, lawyers leave no stone unturned in the settlement of clinical mishaps and drive results based on meaningful case stories or case studies about successfully defended claims that speak to the concerns of their prospective patient clients hiring legal help. This way of creating valuable content on the Web via case studies/stories enable lawyers to develop a digital presence for their law firms whilst engaging customers and building social traction. Against this backdrop, the present paper addresses the way medical malpractice stories as a Web genre are constructed in professional discourse where a doctor or medical professional's negligent act or omission causes harm to a patient client, and the way they emphasize the lawyer's acting in the client's interest. Informed by a theoretical framework for genre analysis (Bhatia 2004) and problem-solution pattern (Hoey 2001) in a corpus of randomized, real-life clinical negligence case studies (30) published on British lawyer firm platforms in November 2015, the paper examines first the organizational (move) structure and then the most salient lexico-grammatical features that relate the communicative practices to the communicative purposes of the genre. Looking at the Web-mediated case study genre as the outcome of social action and as an interdiscursive site where law and medicine are intertwined, the paper discusses the linguistic and discoursal choices authors make and the effect they produce in building trust among informed patient clients and promoting lawyer talent and marketing while delivering an unparalleled level of legal service. This is where the value of the Web-mediated case study genre as shaped by primarily informational as well as promotional goals attempts to fill the gap in research on the interface between law and medicine and thus contribute to the field of genre studies.
Informational, Promotional and Trust-building Strategies in the Web Genre of Clinical Negligence Case Studies
TESSUTO, Girolamo
2017
Abstract
Over the last few years the frequency and severity of mishaps in medical practice and legal encounters triggered by malpractice suits have been heavily reported in the headlines and the media in general, indicating the tensions which arise when ethical trust between doctors (and other healthcare professionals) and patients breaks down and the legal mechanisms for responding to patient safety episodes in healthcare. By utilizing the tools the Internet provides, lawyers leave no stone unturned in the settlement of clinical mishaps and drive results based on meaningful case stories or case studies about successfully defended claims that speak to the concerns of their prospective patient clients hiring legal help. This way of creating valuable content on the Web via case studies/stories enable lawyers to develop a digital presence for their law firms whilst engaging customers and building social traction. Against this backdrop, the present paper addresses the way medical malpractice stories as a Web genre are constructed in professional discourse where a doctor or medical professional's negligent act or omission causes harm to a patient client, and the way they emphasize the lawyer's acting in the client's interest. Informed by a theoretical framework for genre analysis (Bhatia 2004) and problem-solution pattern (Hoey 2001) in a corpus of randomized, real-life clinical negligence case studies (30) published on British lawyer firm platforms in November 2015, the paper examines first the organizational (move) structure and then the most salient lexico-grammatical features that relate the communicative practices to the communicative purposes of the genre. Looking at the Web-mediated case study genre as the outcome of social action and as an interdiscursive site where law and medicine are intertwined, the paper discusses the linguistic and discoursal choices authors make and the effect they produce in building trust among informed patient clients and promoting lawyer talent and marketing while delivering an unparalleled level of legal service. This is where the value of the Web-mediated case study genre as shaped by primarily informational as well as promotional goals attempts to fill the gap in research on the interface between law and medicine and thus contribute to the field of genre studies.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
