Statistics show that every 15 seconds someone will sustain a brain injury in the United States. Someone will die from a serious traumatic brain injury every 5 minutes, and another will become seriously disabled.
Traumatic brain injury is also the leading cause of death and disability in children and young adults. As many as 100,000 Americans will die each year as a result of a brain injury. Of those that survive, as many as 90,000 will suffer life long debilitating problems.
A lawyer’s job is to represent the severely brain injured person competently and successfully. The brain injury lawyer should have an impeccable reputation, and a thorough knowledge of the local rules and procedures that may apply to a brain injury lawsuit.
The lawyer must also have successfully represented brain injury clients over many years. With experience comes wisdom and the ability to persuade insurance companies and juries how the client deserves maximum compensation for the injury and resulting damages.
The lawyer must be thoroughly knowledgeable about the various aspects and/or stages of the brain injury case.
1. Injury documentation and history. The attorney must obtain adequate medical documentation of the injury, and in some cases create the documentation by employing suitable experts to examine the client and prepare reports. The lawyer should also perform a thorough search of the brain injured client’s past, to include pre-injury medical and psychological conditions and treatment, educational issues, prior learning disabilities and prior drug or alcohol problems. The defense will dig into the brain injured client’s past history so the victim’s lawyer must know what exists from the very start.
2. Expert evaluation is paramount. The lawyer must also hire experts to help support the various issues involved in a typical brain injury case, like those experts to help prove liability, the injury itself or causation, and damages. These experts may include accident reconstruction experts, medical doctors, vocational counselors, psychologists or psychiatrists, and neuropsychologists, among others.
3. Vocational assessment. The lawyer must determine the impact of the brain injury upon the client’s vocation. This assessment is crucial, and it will likely delve into the areas of general educational development, cognitive capacity, verbal and speech skills, memory aptitude, and a variety of other manual and motor skills that may be impaired or nonfunctioning. The vocational assessment will help the lawyer establish the vocational loss through the testimony of an economist.
4. Lay witness testimony is important. The lawyer must take care to locate and develop appropriate testimony of people who have knowledge of various aspects of the pre-injury and post-injury life of the brain injury victim. These individuals typically include a spouse, children, parents, teachers, co-workers, friends and other people who are close to the victim. Lay witnesses, together with expert testimony and vocational assessment, are often powerful in illustrating and explaining to a jury or an insurance company how devastating the brain injury has been to the victim.
The representation of brain injured victims takes dedication, commitment, and experience on the part of the lawyer and his legal team. The lawyer has to be willing to try the case in court if settlement discussions fail.
The brain injury victim and/or family members should also choose a lawyer who has the financial resources to go the distance, since these cases often end up in litigation and can take a while to resolve. In many severe brain injury cases, the costs of pursuing the case (e.g., hiring experts, conducting discovery, etc.) can easily exceed the sum of $100,000. So you’ll want a lawyer who has a financially successful law practice, and one that can devote the necessary resources to finance a case that may take many months, and sometimes years, to resolve.
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