What Lawyers Won't Tell You About Traumatic Brain Injury Cases (But I Will).

Your head whips down and back as you're hit from behind in a fender bender on Highway 6 outside of Sugar Land. The airbags don't go off, and the visible property damage doesn't even seem that bad. Your neck is a little stiff, and you have a headache, so you go to the emergency room, and they run a CT scan of your head. Everything comes back negative. No fractures, no internal bleeding, so the doctor sends you home to rest. But in the days that follow, you're feeling a little bit more dazed, you're forgetting things. You're more irritable and things just don't seem right. Your boss might say that you seem a little off. Your family says that you're still probably shaken up from the crash, but something's not right and you know it. This is a traumatic brain injury. And in Texas, insurance adjusters are trained to fight hard against these claims because on paper, everything seems normal. On the outside, you seem perfectly fine. Here's the part that surprises most people. A normal CT scan doesn't mean that you don't have a brain injury. It just means that you don't have any fractures or internal bleeding or that you don't need an emergency brain surgery right then and there. But a concussion or a mild traumatic brain injury can still affect you for the rest of your life. So the insurance company gets a copy of your medical file and they've already got their argument built in. The CT scan was negative. Everything seemed fine. So you don't have any injury. That's not a medical conclusion. That is a defense argument. insurance companies use for these types of cases all the time. Unfortunately, these kind of arguments work on people and on lawyers who don't know how to argue traumatic brain injuries. I've watched this play out with case after case here in Texas. A traumatic brain injury is not decided on the police report. It's decided on the documentation of those medical symptoms for that injury. And it's the documentation of these symptoms where most injured victims and where most attorneys get it wrong. So let's talk about what a traumatic brain injury actually is because there's multiple types of TBIs. On one side, what's called a mild traumatic brain injury, you still have headaches, confusion, difficulty finding words, and a complete change to your personality. But it's still called mild. That doesn't mean that it's not real. It just means that it's not severe. And on the other end, you have severe traumatic brain injuries where you have fractures, internal bleeding, complete loss of motor function, comatose. Those kind of things that someone can recognize what you think about when you hear the words traumatic brain injury. And there's a spectrum of everything in between, from mild to severe. And unfortunately, if you're not in a coma, the insurance company will try to minimize that brain injury and make it seem like it's nothing. Because the word concussion seems like something that everyone gets once in a while. They don't think of it as a problem. permanent brain injury that it often is. And what works to the insurance company's advantage is that these traumatic brain injuries aren't always black and white like a fracture or a tear of the shoulder that's visible in an MRI. A lot of times the medical scans that you get, a CT scan or even a brain MRI, might still be negative even though the traumatic brain injury is very real. And that's because the damage to your brain is actually caused at the microscopic level where electrical signals are sent between these very small parts in your brain called the axons. Now, these axons are much smaller than what an MRI can see and a lot smaller than what you can pick up on a CT scan or an x-ray. And when you're in a car crash, if you think about it, your brain is floating in liquid inside your skull. And when you get hit from behind, whether it's 15 miles an hour or 50, Your brain slams against your skull very hard, even if you don't have a crack in your actual skull. In fact, you don't even need to hit your head on anything at all. Just the sudden force of slamming on the brakes or getting hit from behind can cause your brain to slam into your skull, causing a permanent brain injury. A hard enough impact can tear and shear those cells inside the brain, which is causing the damage. This is called a diffuse axonal injury. And like I talked about earlier, the axons are at a microscopic level that's not going to be picked up by a CT scan or MRI. A jury doesn't need to understand the medical term. What they need to know is that the term, the scan was negative, is not the same thing as there's nothing wrong. And conflating those two things is exactly what the insurance company tries to do. So here's the defense playbook. If there's no fracture of the skull, There's no bleeding on the brain and you're not in the hospital for a week. There's no coma. Well, then they're just going to call it a simple headache, lowball your case and try to move on. I've seen adjusters do this time and time again for all of these brain injury cases because the insurance company knows that a jury is going to react differently to seeing an actual fracture like a broken bone that you can see in black and white. Compared to a brain injury, that's a lot harder to see. They're hoping that you'll just take whatever number they offer you and move on. But don't take the bait. The invisibility of the injury doesn't mean that the injury isn't real. It just means that you have to work a lot harder in proving and documenting your symptoms. That documentation begins immediately after the crash and continues in the weeks and months that follow. Every headache, every moment of confusion or dazed. Every nausea symptom or mood swing needs to be documented in some medical record. Insurance companies are always looking for gaps in treatment to say that something else must have caused your brain injury, not the crash. So it's important that you have visits with a TBI specialist, which is usually a neurologist. Your primary care doctor is not specialized enough to be able to detect traumatic brain injuries. And if you look at their records by itself, It probably won't give you enough evidence to prove that you have a TBI. And the longer you wait to get to a specialist, the more likely an insurance company is going to say, well, it must mean that the injury is not that bad or that something else must have caused it. And for these types of cases, witness statements are extremely important. Statements from your coworkers or your boss, from your spouse or your family or your friends, Those can be extremely important in helping to identify. How you've changed since the accident. I've had cases where my client's spouse will be able to talk about how they used to run the entire family's finances, but now they can't even balance a checkbook. And that kind of before and after testimony speaks volumes more than the medical records can show. Something that can help your case is keeping a symptom journal. If you keep a journal that documents all the problems that you're having each day, starting with your first week, or as soon as you can start the journal, that can be powerful evidence later on. It can help refresh your memory about the problems that you deal with each day, because years later, you might not remember everything that you were going through each week of your life after the crash. It also helps build a timeline that defense attorneys can't really argue against months later. So let's talk about the proper type of TBI testing that can do a good job of identifying what your problems are. We're talking here about neuropsychological evaluations. The neuropsychological evaluation is usually the most important piece of evidence in a traumatic brain injury case. This kind of exam often lasts for hours and it tests you in multiple areas such as processing Processing speeds, memory. And it compares your results against the population at large and hopefully compares you against what you were before this crash. This kind of exam and this kind of testing helps identify and measure something like. I feel foggy. It helps identify and document exactly what your deficit is and how bad it is. This kind of report from a neuropsychologist helps to identify and quantify your deficits. So it's not just saying, well, I feel foggy. It has a measurable difference between you and the population at large or you and who you were before this crash. And if you pair this kind of neuropsych report with an expert witness to talk about brain injuries. All of a sudden, your invisible injury becomes very visible and very explainable to a jury. And here's why these cases carry real value when they're done correctly. It's because a traumatic brain injury doesn't just affect one part of your body. It affects your entire life. It can end your career if you can't focus at work and do the job that you used to be able to do. It can ruin a marriage when you're far more irritable and subject to mood swings that you didn't have before the crash. If you used to be sharp and clever and funny, and now you struggle to follow a conversation, that affects you in just about every interaction that you have. And family members often notice this injury before the injured person does. Lost wages, lost earning capacity, future medical expenses that include months of cognitive therapy, all of this needs to be built into the case against the insurance company. However, none of it shows up if it's not documented well and the case is not built up properly. And this is exactly why a traumatic brain injury case is not right for a general practice attorney or for someone to handle on their own. It takes a lot of sophistication and expertise in showing how to prove these brain injury cases because it's not as easy as a broken leg. These cases often require pulling in neuroradiologists, neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists all to talk about how we know your brain injury is real and how it's likely to affect your life. It requires knowing which brain injury specialists do what and how do you prove something that's so hard to see. When the CT scan and the x-ray are negative, how do you put value on something that is much harder to prove? This kind of stuff is specialized personal injury work. It's not general practice and it requires a lot of experience to do it the right way. We've talked before in another video about what drives big settlements here in Texas and everything in that video would apply right here to traumatic brain injury cases. If you haven't seen that video yet, I highly recommend watching it before you ever need it. This kind of knowledge is the difference between getting a lowball offer and getting full value. for what was taken from your life in the way of health. And if you're dealing with head trauma from an incident that you've had, our contact information is in the description below. You can also go to our website, call us or submit a form anytime you want. Our consultations are always 100% free and we work on a contingency fee basis, which means that we don't get paid unless we win. So in your life, Have you ever had a doctor tell you that the x-ray or the CT scan was clear, even though you felt that something still wasn't right? Tell us your story in the comments below. I'm Max the Axe for Lone Star Injury Attorneys. Thank you for watching.