Taking medicolegal expertise to heart

In 2025, almost 30,000 people were killed or seriously injured in road traffic accidents.

The sheer scale of the figure means top surgeons such as Mr Kulvinder Lall are in high demand as he specialises in aortic, coronary, mitral and electrophysiological surgery, and has performed more than 5000 heart operations as an NHS surgeon.

“I deal with all things inside the chest, so cardiac, aortic, thoracic surgery, people who have been involved in road accidents and especially thoracic injuries such as rib fractures,” he explains.

Based at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London (part of Barts Health NHS Trust) he was first appointed at the age of 36 and at the time was one of the youngest cardiac surgeons in the UK having qualified in medicine in 1989 from Kings College, London, before undertaking specialist training in London, Glasgow and Sydney.

“When I qualified you had to do six months in each specialism before being allowed to do your Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons exam,” he says. 

“I went to work at the Royal Brompton hospital for a surgeon called Sir Magda Yacoub, the leading heart transplant surgeon in the UK at the time and he was inspiring.  Watching him do complex congenital cardiac operations was something I thought was really interesting. I had done orthopaedics and general surgery but felt cardiac surgery was my calling.”

“Cardiac and thoracic surgery is a challenging technically and mentally. It's an intellectual challenge as well as being good with your hands.”

Mr Lall went on to implant the first stentless heart valve in Asia and sutureless heart valves in London and has presented his data at many international conferences.

Mr Lall has been carrying out medicolegal work for about 20 years after becoming a consultant at St Bartholomew’s in 2003 and has been with TLA since 2021.

“When I became the governance lead at Bart's for cardiohoracic surgery, I was asked to write some reports for the trust and it really interested me, so it went from there,” he adds.

“It is very interesting to hear the stories of claimants and defendants. Medicolegal work also helps me shape my practice. You pick out the good things and, more importantly, the bad things. You look at something and think, ‘how could someone have done that?’ Then you realise that actually it's easily missed within the NHS. I then try to modify practices at Bart's.” 

Mr Lall works on both clinical and personal injury cases producing up to 40 reports a year. With personal injury his main focus is thoracic trauma – often caused when people have been involved in road accidents and have fractured ribs, sternums, pneumothoraxes or hemopneumothoraxes, for example, that require prognosis reports. 

His experience at St Bartholomew’s, a level one trauma centre, means he has a lot of experience in this field. With clinical negligence, his expertise in the cardiac and aortic spaces gives him valuable insight. 

He adds: “Condition and prognosis reports for road accidents are fairly straightforward. Once you've examined the patients, you have a pretty good idea of how they have have healed from their trauma, and what their ongoing issues are. 

In the clinical negligence space, you can end up with up to 10,000 pages of medical records which takes a lot of time to trawl through and can be quite complex.  

“However, you quickly pick up where things are going and if the claim is going to be successful or not just from a screening report.”

Mr Lall is an honorary senior lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London in cardiovascular and thoracic medicine where he also carries out significant research. In 2019 he also became an honorary professor of cardiac surgery at Cairo University.

To date he has published about 45 articles in peer-reviewed journals and also teaches cardiac surgery to medical students and doctors in the United States, Europe, China, Hong Kong and Israel.

He is a member of the the European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery; the International Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery; the Society of Thoracic Surgeons and the Medicolegal Society, London as well as being a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. 

In 2019 he was voted Cardiothoracic Expert of the Year, an award for outstanding medical professionals who provide specialised legal and investigative analysis in judicial proceedings.

In the same year he was nominated for a BAFTA for his work on Channel 5’s Operation Heart Live. 

Outside of work, Mr Lall enjoys the occasional game of tennis and gardening. 

Please email Senior Case Manager Kelly Booker on kelly@tla-medicolegal.com for Mr Lall’s CV and further information.