Choosing the Best Traumatic Brain Injury Attorney

Answer:

The question if either you personally or a family member has suffered a traumatic brain injury, how do you go about determining or deciding who is the best attorney to represent me or my loved one? That’s an extremely common question that people have all the time. They called our office last week and asked one of our attorneys that question. Here’s what our attorney said, and I think it can be helpful to you as well.

The number one difference is you want to talk to the attorney or people in the law firm and find out if they really are experts at handling traumatic brain injury cases because, as the attorney explained, an overwhelming majority of so-called personal injury attorneys are not experts on traumatic brain injury. That’s just a fact. They’ll have some knowledge, of course. The difference between knowledge and expertise is almost night and day. If you talk to them very long, you can quickly tell the difference.

For instance, our website mentions many very sophisticated tests that you can ask the potential law firm or lawyer about, including DTI. Of course, what are they going to say? They’ll always say yes. They go Google it. If you talk to them very much, you can tell they’re finding out about this later than whatever. You can ask them specifically and just listen closely to the answer and see if they’re really talking from knowledge or just talking from whatever they just read on Google.

Why does that make a difference? If they don’t really understand the latest technology, who is going to suffer? You will. We’re up on the latest imaging, the latest treatment. You can read about it on our website.

What’s shocking is not just the fact that most personal injury attorneys are unaware of those things; what’s really shocking is how many physicians are unaware of those advances. One of our attorneys was talking to a doctor at lunch the other day and mentioned some of these brain scans such as the DTI, diffuse tensor imaging. It was clear the doctor didn’t have any clue. This was a doctor who takes care of personal injury patients all the time.

We had a situation once where a school teacher was injured. She had a concussion. We got the right imaging. We proved it, but she wouldn’t get any treatment for it. She said, “I’m too busy. I’m just going to suffer with my headaches or whatever.”

Most of our clients will get treatment, but she refused. She was too busy. We sent her demand into the insurance company, and she had no treatment where normally if you have no treatment, an insurance company offers you pretty close to zero. In this case, because we proved that she did have a concussion, they said okay. No treatment. We’ll still offer $32,000.

In that case our client said, “I’m still having headaches. I’m still suffering, and that’s not enough.” We said, “You could have gone to treatment.” We repeated the NeuroQuant, the test that shows whether you have a loss of volume in the brain, and it showed where she was injured she had a 10% loss. We sent that to the insurance adjuster, and they thought if in one year she lost 10%, in 10 years, she’s not going to have a brain, which is not how it works.

It scared the adjuster, and they doubled the offer. We settled the case with no treatment. That doesn’t happen very often. Of course, if you get the treatment, then we can get substantially more. That’s what most of our clients do because they want to get better. They’re not too busy to get better. This is their life.

One of the latest exams that we have found very useful is the so-called VNG testing. We found that there’s a very big difference between who does the testing. Ideally, we get it done through a board-certified neurologist who is Arizona licensed. He in his last 18 years has read 100,000 of these VNG exams. It’s more than anybody else.

When the insurance company hires somebody, they’re not going to have the same qualifications. In fact, very commonly the doctor for the insurance company will admit that there’s no way our clients can fake the results. It’s just like with a broken arm on an x-ray. We can prove that they suffer a mild traumatic brain injury and, in some cases, need vestibular rehabilitation for a lifetime. That can be millions and millions of dollars.

That often gets insurance companies to say we only have whatever we have here, $100,000 or $500,000 or $1 million. That doesn’t always work that way, but often it does. If they don’t recognize the seriousness and we need to go to arbitration to prove our clients’ case, we will. That’s what you want to find out. Is the lawyer or law firm you’re talking with familiar with these things?

If you’re more familiar with these issues than they are because you went on our website, that’s the wrong law firm. Make sure that you hire a law firm who is really going to help you both get the right diagnosis and the right treatment and the right recovery. Remember, the call is free. The information is free. That is actually our area of expertise is traumatic brain injury, as if you couldn’t tell. Call us because if you’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury, we doubly care about you.