According to a recent study, there are at least 2.9 million people who suffer from a brain injury annually. Some of these brain injuries can be caused because of another individual’s careless or reckless attitude. Such incidents also occur in New York, where lots of people suffer from brain injuries every year as a result of accidents caused because of the negligence of other drivers. In instances like these, it is recommended to contact a New York City Brain Injury Lawyer that could assist you during those difficult times where compensation against the damages caused can bring some relief to the victims. A brain injury lawyer will help you explore your options that are well within the legal limits.
Hiring a lawyer will not just help in recovering the damages but can also help you gain substantial compensations to cope with the aftermaths in the future. If a person’s brain injury is the result of someone else’s negligence, then, under the prevailing law, the victim has the right to demand justice in the form of monetary compensation and holding the person accountable. In this article, we will explore what brain injuries are and how lawyers can intervene to benefit the victim.
What Constitutes as a Brain Injury?
When we are talking about brain injury, there is a fine line between injuries that can be considered as brain injuries and injuries that cannot. A brain injury is also referred to as a traumatic injury and can refer to either brain damage, a concussion, or head trauma. More often than not, these injuries are bound to have a traumatic and physical toll on the lives of the victims and their family members. What makes the situation worse is if you have been a victim of a brain injury due to someone else’s negligence.
This is where the law steps in and guarantees some sort of protection to the victims. Lawyers hired by victims of brain injury tend to work for the betterment of not just the victim but also the victim’s family members who are at the receiving end of hard times. Brain injuries can make it very difficult for the victim to maintain their previous lifestyle, and thus they are forced into rebuilding their lives, and the involvement of lawyers can aid the process.
Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) themselves are mainly of three different types:
Blast Injury: This type of injury refers to brain damage caused due to an explosion.
Penetrating Head Injury: This type of injury is a result of either a foreign object or the ground causing a fracture or crack in the victim’s skull.
Closed Head Injury: This type of injury does not cause any apparent damage to the skull but results in either a concussion, pressure on the brain, brain bleed, or other trauma.
Common Causes and Symptoms of a Brain Injury
To further understand brain injuries, let us look at the common causes of a brain injury and then the symptoms that could hint at the presence of a TBI. Common causes include accidents on the road and work-site, drowning, slipping or falling, unintentional blunt trauma, physical assault, or medical malpractice. Unintentional blunt trauma refers to a brain injury that is caused by an item falling on your head, whereas medical malpractice includes the incompetence of doctors failing to monitor patients.
Motor vehicle incidents are one of the most common causes of brain injury and constitute about 14% of brain injury cases, whereas physical assault accounts for about 10% of cases. Brain injuries caused through any of these causes are subject to the intervention of the law, and thus victims should contact lawyers in these incidents.
The symptoms of a brain injury should not go unnoticed as it could lead to an undiagnosed situation that could easily get out of hand. A serious brain injury could result in a long-term disability and can even go as far as the death of victims. These symptoms may vary from person to person, but the most common symptoms of a brain injury range from dizziness, headaches, nausea, and sleep problems to more severe symptoms like memory loss, changes in hearing and/or vision, slurred speech, trouble in finding words and even emotional changes like depression, anxiety, fear, and panic.
Why Hiring a Lawyer is a Suitable Option?
If you or anyone around you has suffered through a brain injury in the recent past, then suggesting them to hire an attorney is a very good and vital option. Attorneys usually have a lot of experience dealing with these complex situations and can help in easing your sufferings. Lawyers can prevent you from the hassle of dealing with insurance companies by making it their responsibility, giving the victim and their families time to cope with the situation more effectively.
More often than not, the lawyers involved in brain injury cases will work with different teams of medical experts, industry specialists, and even investigators to get to the bottom of the situation. The goal is to resolve the situation most effectively while ensuring that the victims get adequate compensation for the damages caused. These may include getting the accused person to compensate for medical bills, rehabilitation, lost wages, long-term care that is required, lost earning power, and any pain and suffering caused to the victim.
In addition to all of this, lawyers might fight your case on a pro-bono basis, thus putting the victim out of the misery of affording a lawyer in the first place. In other instances, lawyers may charge a fee on a conditional basis, i.e., charging a fee if the case is won and a significant compensation is obtained for the victims and their families.
Lawyers will assist in suing the accused person or their insurance companies and will then deal with the technicalities of the lawsuit, keeping the victim out of any added stress or pressure. However, it is essential that the lawyer representing the victim should not just be good at his game but should also be very compassionate towards the cause to provide maximum utility and satisfaction to the victims and their families.
Common Steps that Brain Injury Lawyers opt for
A professional and well-experienced lawyer will start by conducting a very detail-oriented investigation of the victim’s injury and its causes. For this, the lawyer may contact medical experts or investigators who could help speed things up and providing relevant information. This investigation will lead to a conclusion of the person responsible for the incident.
However, there are instances when there will be more than one person who is responsible for the incident. In these instances, the lawyers will contact all relevant and involved parties to maximize the insurance coverage that can be received in favor of the victim. The next logical step would be to find all relevant applicable insurance policies that could tip the scales in favor of the victim.
The other side of the cases requires attorneys to contact medical experts to fully assess the extent of the injury and devise a plan of how the victim should proceed forward with their treatments and how future medical needs will be catered. Furthermore, this plan will include an estimated budget of all the medical expenses that will be incurred. The budget that is presented to the accused parties will also consist of costs incurred due to loss of income caused by a reduced earning capacity, the victim’s pain, and any other relevant costs of the injury.
Lawyers are also required to keep their clients updated with the progress of the case while making themselves available in case the client needs them to answer any queries or resolve any worries that might arise in the victim or their family’s minds.
Seeking Compensation for Brain Injury
While it might be possible for the victim or their family to handle the situation on their own and receive a somewhat fair amount of monetary compensation, the involvement of a lawyer can cause a significantly positive impact on the monetary compensation received by the victim. Lawyers will devise a budget after involving relevant authorities and making all necessary calculations. The final budget that is presented will require further investigations and analysis of the case at hand.
Any successful and smart attorney will make sure he/she does a thorough preparation and gets familiarized with even the most minute details of the case. This is essential as it will help in adopting an effective negotiation strategy and will give the lawyer an upper hand if the case goes to trial or if negotiations have to be made during a settlement. If the appointed lawyer fails to convince the insurance company to recover the stated loss, ideally, the lawyer will then take the case a step further and present it to the New York Jury. From here on, the jury will hear the facts and figures related to the case, and the lawyer’s job will be to convince the jury in favor of the victim to influence their final decision.
The involvement of an attorney becomes very important when insurance companies get involved. This is because insurance companies are already aware of the high stakes involved in brain injury claims, and thus, they will try and limit the amount of monetary compensation that is handed over to the client. For this reason, an expert negotiator, in the form of a lawyer, will be required to intervene to not get intimidated by the insurance company workers and get the best outcome from a negotiation.
What the victims and their family members should do?
If there has been an incident of a brain injury, then the person helping the victim should get the victim immediate medical attention. This is necessary to conduct a thorough investigation of the victim’s condition and prevent any symptoms from going undiagnosed. Getting immediate medical help also has the possibility of shielding the victim from possible long-term physical and cognitive damages.
While the medical process is being carried out, the entire process should be documented. Documenting the process is essential as it could prove to be of tremendous help once an attorney has been contacted. The documentation will not just include the medical process and bills but will also be inclusive of any time that the victim had to miss from work due to the injury, prescriptions and will also have profiles of any witnesses that were present on the scene.
Once all this documentation has been done, the victim’s family, or the victim, can contact their preferred attorney and reach out to them with their case. Upon contacting the lawyer, relevant details like the lawyer’s fee and any relevant experience with similar cases should be provided to the client.
One thing to keep in mind before contacting an attorney is to be aware of the time limit that the state allows, after which filing a lawsuit becomes invalid. If the party fails to contact an attorney within the legal time limit, then the case can easily become invalid and will thus render no fruit for the victim’s party.
Conclusion
Brain injury is one of the most debilitating and serious possible aftermaths of an accident, therefore it requires serious concern from all involved parties. Diagnosing a brain injury is one of the most crucial steps since sometimes some of the most obvious symptoms are not visible. The effects of untreated brain injuries can last for an entire lifetime. In instances when victims back out of receiving the much-needed medical attention due to financial constraints, it becomes vital to contact an attorney.
There are a lot of lawyers that have expertise in brain injury-related cases and they can help the victims through these trying times by getting them the demanded compensation or a favorable settlement. Personal injuries such as brain injury should be taken seriously, and immediate medical care should be obtained to avoid any serious consequences. Hiring a brain injury is also an important thing for victims of brain injury as it can help them claim compensation for the physical damage caused by other people.