Common Questions about TBI Cases

Jim Betz has worked with many clients suffering from traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) over his decades of legal experience, fighting for their unique needs that stem from such a unique injury. TBI cases differ from other personal injury cases in which a client may have suffered a spinal injury or even visible bruising or lacerations because TBIs are difficult to diagnose and prove. Often, their symptoms are ‘invisible’ or seen as inconsequential by insurance companies, but to the client, they couldn’t be more real. Mr. Betz sat down to answer a few questions about TBI cases and his experience resolving them for his clients.

Q: What is your experience handling cases involving traumatic brain injuries?

A: Over my forty-some years of practicing, I’ve handled numerous traumatic brain injury cases ranging from minor to more-severe traumatic brain injuries.

Q: How do traumatic brain injury cases differ from other personal injury cases in your approach?

A: They’re a lot more difficult. Our clients are suffering from difficult symptoms to deal with. It requires a keen understanding and empathy for what they’re going through. A client who doesn’t have a traumatic brain injury can matter-of-factly say, “I’m hurt. My neck is injured, and I have headaches,” but a traumatic brain injury client has a more complex involvement of many different parts of the brain and the body.

Q: What challenges do you typically encounter in proving a traumatic brain injury, especially in mild cases?

A: It’s often difficult to prove because the brain injury doesn’t often show up on a scan. An MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) or CT (computed tomography) scan taken right after the crash might come back normal. What we have to do is go a step further, and if our clients are continuing to have problems, get them in for an evaluation by a sophisticated scan like a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scan. There are very few facilities in the country that perform these, but we know of clinics that do. This is a way that the injury can be objectively identified, so we don’t have to rely exclusively on the client’s complaints of difficulties.

Q: What kind of treatments do clients with traumatic brain injuries typically undergo?

A: Clients typically treat at brain injury clinics where they can receive occupational therapy or speech therapy. A lot of times, there are sleep issues, so they may need to undergo a sleep study. They also might require psychological care and treatment or medication. One type of injury that can happen with a traumatic brain injury is damage to the pituitary gland. An injury to the pituitary gland can result in deficiencies in growth hormone production, which causes our clients to struggle with fatigue. In these cases, injections of growth hormones can be necessary. Treatments for traumatic brain injuries can be complex.

Q: How do you determine the value of a traumatic brain injury claim?

A: The value depends on the consequences of the injury––whether the client has missed time at work, how much treatment is required, and how much the medical expenses have been. But mostly, it’s the impact that this injury has had on our client’s life, which can be far-ranging and extensive.

Q: What types of damages do you pursue in these cases?

A: We pursue recovery of medical expenses, any type of therapy expenses, loss of earning capacity, coverage for any adaptive equipment, and a life-care plan for the client and their families. All of this is to help bring the client as close to back-to-normal as possible after the tragedy.

Q: How do you prepare for trial in a traumatic brain injury case, especially with invisible injuries?

A: Preparing for trial is a complex and enormous task. It requires interviewing all of the expert witnesses and ensuring their opinions are reduced to writing and disclosed to the other side. It also includes interviewing before and after witnesses so that we can establish what our client’s life was like before the tragedy compared to after. A lot of time, the before-and-after witnesses can be the most compelling in establishing what has happened to our clients. Those are key. It requires advanced planning and a lot of detail in seeing how everything fits together. It’s the mark of a good outcome on a case.

Q: Who might you bring in as an expert witness?

A: For expert witnesses in a traumatic brain injury case, we would interview emergency room personnel, nurses, and other people who would have helped our client in the hospital. After that, we would interview and prepare for testimony any neurologists, neuropsychological experts, psychologists, occupational therapists, and speech therapists involved in our client’s recovery.

Q: How do you present cognitive or emotional impairments to a jury?

A: These impairments are usually brought to the attention of a jury through the use of a neuropsychological expert. They are well-versed in all of the psychological testing that’s involved in determining the impact of a traumatic brain injury on a person’s life. Diffusion tensor imaging can also be used to correlate the clinical symptoms a client identifies with the organic injury that can be shown on the image.

Q: What differentiates a concussion from a traumatic brain injury, and why should an injured individual look into filing a claim?

A: A concussion can be anything from temporary headaches to temporary loss of consciousness to short-term memory loss, then healing afterwards. A traumatic brain injury includes a concussion, but it can be longer-lasting. A person may continue to have ongoing cognitive impairment, like word-finding difficulties, stuttering, headaches, fatigue, blurred vision, or other ongoing symptoms. Oftentimes, these injuries are permanent and have to be dealt with on a long-term basis. This comes from analyzing and evaluating to make sure that our clients receive the correct treatment so that the injury can be diagnosed and dealt with.

If we can help answer any questions you might have about a traumatic brain injury and what to do about it, please give us a call.