Updated September 1, 2021

Why Is It Important to Hire a Lawyer Familiar with Spinal Cord Injuries?

Transcript

If a person has suffered a spinal cord injury, there are several reasons why it’s important to hire a lawyer who’s got experience handling spinal cord injury cases.

One is that the lawyer needs to understand what the possible theories of liability would be. You have to be familiar with the law to know if you have a case or not.

For instance, in a product liability case involving a vehicle that may have a defectively-designed roof or a vehicle in which it has rolled over when it should not have, the lawyer has to first of all be able to understand that there could be such a theory of liability to begin with. Without experience, you might not even think of that.

The lawyer also needs to understand that you have to prove that the defect in the vehicle was the cause of the injury. You have to tie the vehicle defect to the cause of the spinal cord injury, and that’s not always easy to do, and it’s something that, again, without experience, you wouldn’t even know that that could be an issue in the case.

Diving accidents are another good example of this. A property owner has a duty to warn somebody who is on their property of a dangerous situation that may not be known to the person using the property. So, somebody dives off a dock into the water and there’s some kind of a pipe under the water that’s not visible, the property owner has to notify the person using the property of that kind of a dangerous situation. Again, you have to understand the law to know that that’s a possibility.

The next thing that’s important is understand the consequences of a spinal cord injury. A lawyer with experience knows about the rehabilitation process, knows what it takes to go through this, and we oftentimes video tape some of the rehab process so that the jury can later see it and understand what a person has gone through. Without the experience of knowing what these victims go through, you wouldn’t really even have the wherewithal to video tape the procedures to begin with.

Finally, the lifelong consequences of spinal cord injury are really the focus of such a case. We always want to make sure and look at not just the economic impact—for instance, can the person work or not—but the cost of future medical care. We hire a nurse or a doctor to put together what is called a life care plan. That means a plan that is intended to take into account all the medical supplies, all the equipment, all the therapy, all the money it will cost to take care of a spinal cord victim for the rest of their lives, since they are unable to take care of themselves to a large extent.

For all these reasons, hiring a lawyer with experience in a spinal cord injury case is an important thing to do when you’re deciding who to retain as counsel.

Contact a Spinal Cord Injury Attorney Today

If you or a loved one have suffered from a spinal cord injury, contact the Indianapolis Spinal Cord Injury Attorneys of WKW. We can help you get the compensation you deserve. Call 317.920.6400 or fill out an online contact form for a free, no-obligation case evaluation.