Oral Surgeon Malpractice Attorney in California

She was nineteen, home from college for the summer, and her parents' insurance covered the four wisdom teeth coming out before fall semester. The whole thing took forty minutes. What she remembers is waking up in the recovery chair with her mouth packed in gauze and the left side of her tongue feeling like it belonged to someone else. The office said that was normal. They said it again at the one-week check. And the one-month. By the time a neurologist used the phrase "lingual nerve transection," her family had lost months believing it would heal on its own — and the one-year clock that governs these cases in California had been running the whole time.

If any part of that story is yours — or your child's — keep reading.

Oral surgeons are held to a specialist's standard

This is the first thing to understand, because it changes the whole case. An oral and maxillofacial surgeon is not held to the standard of a careful general dentist. California holds specialists to the standard of a reasonably careful specialist — the training, the imaging, the planning, and the judgment of a board-certified surgeon. When a case needed a CBCT scan, a coronectomy, a dedicated anesthesia monitor, or a referral, "a general dentist might have done the same thing" is not a defense. The specialist standard is higher because the specialist chose to hold themselves out as one.

The wisdom-tooth cases

Lower wisdom teeth sit directly on top of the inferior alveolar nerve, and their roots often wrap the canal. The lingual nerve runs along the inside of the jaw right where the flap is opened. Every oral surgeon knows this, which is why the standard of care has real, testable steps — and why the cases we take tend to have the same fingerprints:

1. 01
   Inadequate imaging.

   A panoramic x-ray that shows roots near or wrapping the canal calls for a CBCT 3D scan before surgery. Operating without it — or ignoring what it showed — is below the specialist standard.
2. 02
   No coronectomy discussion.

   When the nerve risk is high, the accepted alternatives include a coronectomy — deliberately removing the crown and leaving the roots in place — or not operating at all. A patient who was never offered the safer option was never truly consented.
3. 03
   Nerve injury handled with 'wait and see.'

   Some nerve injuries can be repaired — but the window for microneurosurgical repair is measured in weeks to months, not a year of "give it time." A surgeon who doesn't refer a suspected transection to a nerve repair specialist promptly can turn a treatable injury into a permanent one.
4. 04
   The mechanical errors.

   Wrong tooth extracted. Jaw fractured through excessive force and never disclosed. Root tips or bone fragments retained without telling the patient. Upper-molar extractions that open a communication into the sinus and get patched over with instructions to 'not blow your nose.'

The anesthesia cases — the ones that should never happen

Every few years a California family makes the news because a child or young adult went into a dental office for a routine extraction under IV sedation and didn't come home. These are the most devastating cases in this field, and the most preventable, because the safety rules are not subtle: continuous monitoring of oxygen, heart rate, blood pressure, and (for deep sedation) CO2; a dedicated, trained person whose only job is the anesthesia — not the surgeon doing both jobs at once; emergency drugs, airway equipment, and a defibrillator in the room; and a real pre-operative medical history, not a clipboard form nobody read.

California's Dental Board requires specific permits to administer sedation and general anesthesia, and those permits come with staffing and equipment requirements. When an office cuts those corners — to save a staff salary, to keep the schedule moving — and a patient codes in the chair, that is not a bad outcome. That is the definition of negligence, and the investigation usually finds the warnings were sitting in the file.

"But I signed a consent form"

Every family we represent signed one. Here's the honest legal reality: a consent form documents that you accepted the known risks of a procedure performed properly. It is not a license to perform it improperly. Consenting to the risk of nerve damage from a careful extraction is not consenting to an extraction done without imaging, without the safer alternative being offered, or with a nerve injury that was then never referred for repair. What the form says, what you were actually told, and whether the discussion was real or a signature collected in the hallway — those are evidence questions, and they're where these cases are often won.

The California rules — and the special rule for children

• Adults generally have one year from discovering the injury, and never more than three years from the injury itself, to file (CCP § 340.5), plus a 90-day written notice of intent to sue.
• Children get more time: for a child under six, a malpractice claim can be brought until three years after the injury or the child's eighth birthday, whichever is later — and older minors get tolling as well. But evidence doesn't wait, and neither should you.
• MICRA caps pain-and-suffering at $470,000 (non-death) and $650,000 (wrongful death) in 2026, rising annually. Economic damages — revision surgery, nerve repair, a lifetime of adaptive care in a brain-injury case, lost income, and in wrongful-death cases the financial support the family lost — are uncapped.
• Cases are filed in the county where the surgery happened. Our office is in Sacramento, and we evaluate serious oral surgery cases statewide.

What to do right now

• Request the complete chart in writing — operative notes, imaging, consent forms, anesthesia records, and the monitoring strip or anesthesia log. In anesthesia cases, that log is the single most important document in the file.
• Get an independent evaluation — a different oral surgeon or, for nerve injuries, a microneurosurgical nerve repair specialist, quickly. The repair window is short.
• Write down the timeline: what risks were discussed before surgery, what you were told afterward, and every date you were told to wait.
• If your child was injured, do not assume you have years — some deadlines run sooner than parents expect, and evidence like the anesthesia log can be requested immediately.
• Mind the one-year clock. Oral surgery offices know it exists. Now you do too.