What Can an Expert Witness Do in a Brain Injury Case?
Depending on the injury type, those experiencing them can endure severe symptoms and conditions like memory loss, impaired vision, seizures, and blindness. Many struggle with communication, emotional behaviour, working, and using standard body skills. Such injuries can genuinely turn someone’s life upside down.
Even more frustrating is knowing that someone else’s ill intentions or negligence were to blame. Victims must then navigate a complex legal system to hold the persons responsible to account and receive the compensation they deserve. That’s where expert witnesses come in. They can be valuable in the average TBI legal case for these reasons:
Establishing the Cause
Highly regarded brain injury law firms often contact expert witnesses in traumatic brain injury cases to establish the cause of an injury. This can often go a long way toward proving negligence; that a defendant was responsible for a brain injury due to their actions.
Expert witnesses will tell a jury how an injury likely happened and identify the damaged parts of the brain. They can also reveal how an accident caused an injury based on their years of experience working with traumatic brain injuries.
Proving TBI Severity
Lawyers must do their best to calculate accident-related costs as accurately as possible to ensure victims can cover related costs now and in the future. That can sometimes be challenging with traumatic brain injuries because they can be hard to predict.
Expert witnesses often have a great deal of knowledge in this area. While they can’t predict the future, they can compare a victim’s brain injuries to those of past personal injury victims to understand the level of treatment required and the likelihood of a full recovery. This information can help judges and juries make informed compensation decisions.
Predicting the Brain Injury’s Impact
Who better to predict a brain injury’s impact than someone with years of experience studying brain injuries and working with people living with them? While a victim and their family might talk about the lasting effects of a brain injury and how it has affected their lives and livelihoods, an expert witness can add weight to their claims.
For example, the family of someone living with a TBI might talk about a victim being a breadwinner and no longer being able to work. An expert witness can confirm their statement and say the victim will never work again and requires ongoing, costly care. Their expert opinion can add more weight to a claim and potentially help the victim create a stronger case.
Valuing a Claim
Some personal injury claims are straightforward in that the injuries someone experienced in an accident will heal and provide no ongoing problems. You can quickly put a damages claim together with vehicle damage, medical bills, and related costs.
Brain injuries can often be much harder to calculate. The losses can be significant and often, unknown. However, expert witnesses can help value a claim. They know how much hospitals charge to provide care for traumatic brain injury victims. They also know the costs of nursing homes and housing alterations to suit a victim’s new complex needs.
Expert witnesses can provide insight into how an accident caused an injury, what it can mean for a victim’s life, and the likely costs they’ll face now and into the future.