Nursing Home & Long-Term Care Litigation
A resident falls twice in the same week, and the second fall doesn’t get written up until three days later. Or a facility’s license lapses eighteen months before anyone notices, and the billing never changes to reflect it.
Nursing home and long-term care cases rarely come down to one dramatic failure. They depend on a paper trail and whether someone in the room can read it correctly before the deposition instead of during it.
The population driving these cases isn’t shrinking.
Americans 80 and older will grow by 8 million over the next decade, and the average nursing home resident is already 79, according to the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living’s 2026 Nursing Home Workforce Report.
The same report found some real recovery on the staffing side: the sector added 40,700 jobs in 2025, and turnover has been easing since 2022. But 90% of providers still say recruitment is difficult. More residents needing care, a workforce that’s rebuilding but not rebuilt.
That gap is exactly where documentation problems live: shifts that were short-staffed, a care plan that says one thing and a chart that says another.
None of that proves negligence by itself. It’s why we’re seeing both plaintiff and defense counsel bring in expert help earlier. Not to build an argument yet, but to find out what the record actually supports before anyone commits to a theory.
Two kinds of experts tend to matter most, and they answer different questions.
A elder care or wound care specialist speaks to the standard of care itself: turning schedules, skin integrity protocols, fall-risk assessments, whether the interventions on paper actually happened.
A vocational or life-care planning expert speaks to what comes after, what ongoing care a resident will realistically need and what it costs over time.
A newer wrinkle we’re seeing more of involves licensing itself.
Adult foster care isn’t the same regulatory category as a nursing home or an assisted living facility, and the distinction matters more than most non-specialist experts realize.
In Michigan, for example, adult foster care homes operate under the Adult Foster Care Facility Licensing Act (1979 PA 218) and the Public Health Code (1978 PA 368), both administered by the state’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. The license determines what a home can call itself and what it can bill for. When a license lapses, or a home markets one level of care while the licensing record says something else, the billing and the licensing stop lining up, and that gap can matter to a plaintiff’s damages theory and a defense team’s coverage position in very different ways.
We supported a case earlier this year with almost exactly that fact pattern. It involved a home that billed around-the-clock attendant care plus a separate housing charge for a resident who, by the family’s own account, was rarely on-site to receive it. The home had once held an adult foster care license. It had let it lapse.
The takeaway? A lapsed license isn’t a paperwork footnote. It changes what should and shouldn’t appear on a billing statement, and that’s often where the real exposure, or the real defense, actually lives. It’s a detail easy to miss if the expert reviewing the file doesn’t know to look for it.
We’ll keep tracking this through the rest of the year, with cyber and data breach litigation up next in October for Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
If you’re staffing a nursing home, long-term care, or adult foster care matter, reach out to Intellex to talk through what kind of expert fits the fact pattern.