In addition to many other kinds of serious bodily harm, truck accident victims have a higher-than-average chance of suffering traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, during their accidents. Does a victim's brain injury change the way a lawyer would handle a personal injury case?

Answer: Yes. Juries often award substantial compensation for verifiable brain injuries, yet they tend to award very little for unverified brain injuries. Therefore, an attorney's litigation strategy must focus on proving the veracity of the brain injury. This concern takes center stage.

It may be hard to see how one kind of injury might be set so far apart from others, or why it would become such a focal point. In this article, we'll explain the main types of brain injuries and why they must be clearly demonstrated to a jury.

What are the Common Types of Traumatic Brain Injury?

When someone suffers severe head trauma, the resulting neurological damage can cause major changes to a person's short- and long-term brain function. Brain injuries suffered during truck accidents can typically be separated into four major categories:

• Closed Head Injuries occur when the brain impacts the inside of the skull, which may happen when the head is suddenly jolted one direction. For instance, a victim thrown forward in a crash may be pulled back by their seat belt or by hitting the steering wheel. Their body rebounds but their brain continues forward and hits the inside of their skull, which can cause serious injuries.
• Penetrating injuries involve direct physical damage to brain tissue and are among the worst forms of head trauma. Penetrating injuries include skull fractures, puncture wounds, and the foreign objects (like vehicle debris) piercing the brain.
• Anoxic injuries occur when the victim suffers a lack of oxygen to the brain, causing a large number of brain cells to die. Those who survive may suffer damaged cognition and overall brain function, leading to numerous long-term difficulties.
• Toxic injuries occur from exposure to or inhalation of certain toxic chemicals that damage brain tissue or affect how much blood and oxygen it receives. They are not common compared to other kinds of TBI, but they may occur if a truck's hazardous cargo leaks or becomes airborne during a crash.

Any of these injuries could lead to problems with crucial brain functions like memory, reasoning, attention, behavioral control, speech, vision, hearing, and bodily system regulation. With the potential to deal life-altering harm, it is small wonder that these injuries often become a focal point for truck accident cases.

Why Focus on Brain Injuries in a Case?

The point of truck accident litigation is to help a victim recover their losses. The damage a TBI can do to an accident victim's quality of life cannot be overstated, which is why it's important that an attorney properly convey its effects to a jury.

Example: Richard is hurt in an accident with an 18-wheeler, suffering a broken leg and a major concussion. If his lawyer treats both of those as injuries of similar gravity, a jury might ultimately decide both are worth similar awards in damages—say, $200,000 for the leg injury and $200,000 for the concussion.

The problem is that almost all leg injuries heal, which cannot be said for many brain injuries. It's an attorney's job to make clear this distinction to the members of the jury. If the lawyer argues that the brain injury is significantly worse than a broken leg and can have farther-reaching negative effects, then the same jury might award a far greater sum for the brain injury than they would for the leg injury.

With that in mind it becomes clear how an experienced attorney must adapt his litigation strategy to focus on the injury to his client's brain. Key to that strategy would be proving the seriousness of the damage, which is not always a simple matter.

How Do You Prove a Brain Injury is Serious?

Not even that long ago, brain injuries typically fell into two categories to an observer: An injury so bad that anyone could tell the sufferer had severe trauma, and everything else. If the victim could walk and talk and follow a finger waved in front of their eyes, people assumed they'd be fine with a little bed rest (or just accused them of being dramatic). Even as medicine progressed and brain imaging technology got more sophisticated, the standard battery of tests conducted at hospitals didn't catch every serious TBI.

Modern medicine has many ways of looking deeper into the brain and detecting less obvious—but still very serious—injuries lurking there. Unfortunately, many of the procedures needed to find that damage are elective, so if an emergency-room MRI doesn't find anything efforts too often stop there. An attorney who suspects their client suffered brain trauma will send them to specialists with more refined equipment, capable of diving deeper and getting clearer answers.

Seeking Compensation After a TBI

If we've learned one thing over decades of helping accident victims, it's that getting a negligent truck driver an their employer to admit fault for injuries—even obvious ones—is never easy. The fact that many serious brain injuries aren't clearly visible to a potential juror means that it's important for an attorney to not only gather evidence that proves the injury exists, but also know how to present it to a jury. How does an attorney do that?

Evidence

Any personal injury or wrongful death case needs clear evidence supporting the victim's claims. For a TBI that might include hospital records, copies of brain imaging, depositions from doctors and technicians who scanned or treated the victim, testimony from physical and occupational therapists who treated the victim, and other medical materials linking the brain injury specifically to the wreck.

Does that sound like a lot of evidence? It is, and to put it bluntly the vast majority of injury attorneys don't have the experience or skillset to gather it all. Without it, there's really no way to properly make the victim's case. Even the theatrics of television lawyers are built upon a strong foundation of evidence.

Expert Testimony

All the evidence in the world doesn't do you bit of good if a jury can't understand it. That's where expert testimony comes in, but to be clear: Not all experts are created equal. There are likely thousands of qualified professionals out there who can understand the evidence in a brain injury case, but the number who can explain medical imaging, charts, etc., to a jury in an accessible way is vanishingly small.

If you hired the right attorney for your case, they've already done the hard work and gathered the evidence. If they don't know the right experts to explain that evidence, though, they've done the legal equivalent of fumbling the ball at the one-yard line. Generally speaking it takes a knowledgeable, experienced attorney to get the correct experts who can explain this complex evidence to a jury in a way that makes sense—and allows that jury to fully appreciate the seriousness of your injury.

Grossman Law Can Help

By this point you're probably thinking that cases with serious brain injuries don't sound like the kind of thing that just any attorney can handle. That's because TBI cases are some of the most complex cases to litigate in the personal injury field. That's not all, either: there are few injuries where the stakes of getting things right are higher. The good news for victims is that the technology to diagnose and prove that brain injuries are serious has been revolutionized over the last 20-25 years. As a consequence, brain injuries that would have received little compensation just 20 years ago are now viable cases if handled properly.

An experienced truck accident brain injury lawyer on your team can make a world of difference with that. The Texas attorneys at Grossman Law Offices have decades of experience helping people who were injured in crashes with 18-wheelers and other commercial trucks, including those who suffered major brain injuries. If you were hurt or lost a loved one in a commercial truck accident, call Grossman Law Offices any time for a free and confidential consultation.