VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Vickie: This is Certified Legal Nurse Consultant Meghan D’Angelo, RN, MSN, CLNC. Meghan, you’ve shared a strategy that you’ve used to get your name out there, and it was through a legal reporter.

Meghan: I connected with a legal reporter on LinkedIn who writes for a legal newspaper with a wide circulation in my area. He called me and ended up doing an interview which was on the front page of an issue that went to 50,000 attorneys.

Vickie: And you’ve had attorneys contact you from that?

Meghan: Yes, that’s correct. I had an attorney from one firm call me right away. He’d actually gone to my website from the article and filled out the contact form and said ‘Hey, I want to work with you.’ He’s a business attorney who happened to have a medical malpractice case. We’ve worked on that case for about a year and half now. He called me a few months ago and said ‘I like this relationship so much that my partner and I have invested in an injury help line and we want to set up a standing contract with you.’

Vickie: You’ve turned a business attorney into a medical malpractice attorney, I love it! That’s really inspiring. You mentioned that you have a contact form on your website that attorneys can fill out. That’s great advice. A lot of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants have websites. You don’t have to make it very extensive, it can be just a few pages, but having a place where an attorney can fill out information so that you can contact them is a smart strategy.

Meghan: Thank you. It’s on every page of my website. It makes it very easy for them. That same law firm got an email from the Maryland State Bar Association (the state where I live) for an attorney that was looking for an endocrinologist. My attorney-client told him, ‘Don’t! You don’t need an endocrinologist. You need Meghan.’

Vickie: That’s amazing! I want to ask about one more thing. I know you’re a pediatric nurse, but you said you don’t really get involved in pediatrics cases. You’re handling cases that are all over the map. I appreciate your versatility and agility and that you’re willing to get involved in a variety of cases.

Meghan: I’m glad to do a pediatric case, but the basic tenants of nursing science are really universal. So when I get an inmate, wrongful death or elder abuse case I educate myself in the areas where I know I have a gap.

Vickie: The key is being responsive to the attorneys. Relevancy is not just about what you know and what you’re learning. Relevancy is responding to the attorneys that are out there and what their needs are and you’re perfectly comfortable with that. Like anybody, you always know what you don’t know and you know you can call another Certified Legal Nurse Consultant for help.

Meghan: That’s right and that’s exactly what I do. I tap into CLNC^® subcontractors when I need to. It’s kind of funny, I keep getting inmate cases now. The one inmate case was so successful, it was also published in the local legal paper and that was from my work in finding the deviations from the standards of care.

Vickie: Another strategy that you’re educating everybody about is when you’re involved in cases and they get written up, attorneys read about you and then suddenly, they do believe that you’re really the expert in that area. Again, knowing you, I know that you’re not just going to render an opinion. You’re either going to do your research or contact a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant to help you with the case.

Meghan: It’s always informed, absolutely. In that last inmate case I had two hours, it was a race against the clock. We needed a new complaint to go out, so I literally just used the NANDA Nursing Diagnosis List and listed all of the failures and that went right into the amended complaint.

Vickie: Congratulations and thank you for sharing.

Meghan: Thank you Vickie.

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