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So when we get a call and someone says they have a brain injury case and they want to talk to you how
do you go about first putting a brain injury case together?
Well to begin with a brain injury case is a personal injury
case. um if you
don't have the elements of a successful
personal injury case it doesn't matter
how serious a brain injure a person has they are not going to recover in court.
And there are three primary elements to
a personal injury case.
And I'm a personal injury lawyer and that means that i work contingent fee
and if we don't recover for a client we don't get paid.
But it's not just that we don't get paid is that we have to risk our own
capital or a lot of money
to invest in their cases.
I talked about expert witnesses.
The expert witnesses in a normal brain injury case that goes to trial
are going to cost a personal injury lawyer
as much as a hundred thousand dollars a bit little of money.
If the jury doesn't find for his client or finds for significantly less than a
than the amount invested
the lawyers is not only not going to collect a fee he's going to lose that
money out of pocket. we've done that.
Umm, you know most
personal injury lawyers like to talk about all the great cases we have won.
We've learned as much from cases we've lost and we've lost cases.
And both you and I carry some of those lossesas we go forward and the
pain that we have felt for our client
is something that we can't we ever really
erase even if we recover from the economic loss
hundred, two hundred thousand dollars in those cases.
To make a case work
first you've got to be able to prove that someone else was at fault
We call that liability.
You have to be able to prove that you're injured because of the wrongful conduct
of someone else.
In most cases
wrongful conduct is negligence.
Negligence is easy to understand when
you're talking about getting rear ended
in an automobile
accident or another car coming
across the roadway/
In a sense negligence is a violation of some rule of conduct even if it's not a
law
that the reasonable person would do.
So the first thing you have to do with is look at
to determine whether someone's
has a personal injury case. Is determined whether or not
someone else was negligent. Sometimes there's more negligence than you realize
We just finished a major case
in Washington
where
uh... we recovered a substantial from
a party who wasn't obviously at fault. That case it was the county before
putting a yield sign instead of a stop sign.
Uh... sometimes
a driver that you would think
which just only
nominally at fault can actually be found enough at fault to recover from.
Those are the kind of things that must be
evaluated by a
personal injury attorney who takes more than a minute or two listen,
to figure out.
The case in washington
it would have been very simple to settle that case fore the policy limits
of the other at fault driver.
we're looking at considerably more because we actually took the time
to investigate.so the first thing you have to do is find liability.
If there's any question you have to do a thorough investigation
and the second thing is
you have to have liability against someone
who has the ability to
pay if you get a judgment.
Brain injury cases are not twenty five thousand or fifty thousand cases.
The kind of brain injury cases that involve disability
will typically have values well about half a million dollars
and in many cases depending on the impact on the person's ability of the person to earn
could be many millions of dollars.
Likewise if that person has significant care needs it could be
millions of dollars.
These are not cases that you can bring with someone against someone that has a
twenty five thousand dollar insurance policy on their car.
The greatest majority of people have one had what they call one hundred three
hundred thousand-dollar policies.
Those are very difficult to bring a case
unless there is something else some other party involved or it's really
straight forward.
And most
brain injury cases that
don't involve hundreds of thousands of dollars medical bills are
not that straight forward.
It can be very challenging.
The third thing you've got to have liability and have a collectible defendant and the third
thing ofcourse isyou have to have
significant damages.
Uh... example of the case that wouldn't have significant damage is is how my case
when I was
twenty one would have been perceived by a lawyer
had I gone to one. He would've looked at the medical bills. I only saw a doctor
on the day of the accident. My medical bills were an ambulance ride
x_-ray and whatever the emergency room charged with the time our medical bills of
considerably grown since then. But my medical bills at that time were probably two
hundred dollars.
If that had been the extent of my diagnosis. That is a case that wouldn't
makes sense for a lawyer
to take because the amount of money to recover would be considerably less than
the amount of money the lawyer would have to prove
and spend to prove that case.
Now and the contrast
had I not
recovered in time frame that I did.
Had I not been able
to go to law school and had I never been able to hold a regular job
you could say
that the case could have value of millions of dollars. I have made a
substantial amount of money over my career
and that accident a little different and I had been hurt a little bit worse
uh... or
adapted a little bit differently
than I did or maybe been a few years older
and hadn't had as good of recovery the
damages could have been quite significant.