Traumatic brain injury claims

01 What these claims are actually about

That is a strange position to be in. You know something is different. The imaging says otherwise, and the imaging is what an adjuster understands.

It is worth being clear that this is a claims problem rather than a medical one. Clinicians have well established ways of assessing these injuries that do not depend on a scan. The difficulty is that a claim is assessed by people who are not clinicians, using documents, and a normal scan is the most legible document in the file. Every TBI claim that runs into trouble runs into it here.

02 The clean scan argument

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it comes from a public health agency rather than from anybody with a case to win.

The agency's public guidance puts the same point in plainer words, stating that even if the injury doesn't show up on these tests, you may still have a mild TBI or concussion. An adjuster treating a clean scan as the end of the discussion is taking a position the CDC does not support.

03 When there was no scan at all

This is a subtler version of the same mistake and it catches people out more often, because the file simply has nothing in it.

So the absence of imaging in a file is not evidence that nothing happened. It may be evidence that the clinician followed the guidance.

04 The loss of consciousness argument

The words are worth holding onto because the phrasing is unambiguous: may or may not. Most people answer this question honestly and watch the answer be used against them, without knowing that the agency's own definition does not require what they are being asked about.

A related trap is the word confused. People describe themselves as having been shaken or dazed and then correct it to fine, because they were embarrassed or because somebody more badly hurt was nearby. Those corrections end up in the record. If you were dazed, disoriented or could not remember the moments around the impact, that is worth saying plainly to a clinician rather than minimizing.

05 Why mild is a misleading word

The label does real damage in claims, because a document saying mild reads to a non-clinician as a document saying minor.

06 What the evidence actually is

Each element is more persuasive the earlier it starts, which is why the first weeks matter disproportionately. A brain injury claim assembled six months late is not impossible, but it is a great deal harder than one begun in week one.

• Neuropsychological testing. Formal assessment by a qualified specialist, producing measured results rather than description. Usually the backbone of the case.
• A contemporaneous symptom record. Kept from the start, not reconstructed later. Dates, what happened, what could not be done that day.
• People who knew you before. Family, colleagues and friends describing specific changes rather than general sympathy. Often the most affecting evidence there is.
• Work and school records. Performance, absences and adjustments, which document the change without anybody having to be believed.
• The earliest clinical notes. What was said in the first hours, including anything about being dazed or unable to recall.

Our guide to choosing a brain injury lawyer covers what to look for in a firm that handles this kind of proof regularly.

07 The pre-existing condition argument

This argument is uncomfortable because it is personal and because it uses true facts. It is also very commonly overstated, and it derails more than one TBI claim a year that should have succeeded.

• Before and after is the answer. A documented level of functioning beforehand is the most effective response there is.
• Worsening is generally recoverable. Many states treat aggravation of an existing condition as compensable, though the rules and the arithmetic vary.
• Your whole history will be requested. Expect broad records demands and take advice before signing an open authorization.
• Honesty is strategically correct. A history disclosed early is context. The same history discovered later is presented as concealment.

08 How these claims are valued

The reason a traumatic brain injury settlement resists a headline number is that the largest components are the least standardised.

• Lost earning capacity. Frequently the largest element, and it turns on the work somebody can no longer do rather than on the job they held.
• Future care and support. Assessed by professionals rather than estimated, and projected across a lifetime.
• The non-economic loss. Personality, relationships, independence. Real, substantial, and the hardest to evidence.
• What coverage exists. A valuation is academic beyond the insurance available. Our guides to what a catastrophic case is worth and to what these claims settle for deal with valuation directly.

A traumatic brain injury settlement offered before the medical picture has stabilised is almost always premature, because the thing being valued is not yet known.

09 What to do in the first days

Five steps. The second and third cost nothing and are worth more later than almost anything else.

10 Red flags

The last one is the clearest signal about whether a firm has done this before.

One closing thought about any brain injury claim. What makes these different is not severity, since many are severe and some are not. It is that the injured person is routinely asked to prove something they cannot point at, to people who want to see a picture. The material quoted on this page exists precisely because that expectation is wrong, and it is published by an agency with no stake in your case. A free case review costs nothing, and you can read how we match people with attorneys before deciding anything.

Sources and authorities

Everything clinical on this page is quoted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and linked.

On the pediatric guidance. That document addresses children, and we have cited it for a narrow proposition: that clinical guidance discourages routine imaging and reserves it for identifying more severe injury. We have not extended anything else from it to adults, and a clinician is the right person to say what applies to any individual.

Why there is no settlement figure here. We have not published a range or an average, because we have no sourced basis for one and because the largest components of these claims are the least standardised. Any figure would be a guess wearing the clothes of information. What a claim is worth depends on the individual loss and, just as importantly, on what insurance exists to pay it.

What we have left out. We have given no prevalence, incidence or recovery statistic, because the CDC material we read this session did not provide one we could state precisely in this context. We have not set out the severity classification bands, which reached us through secondary sources rather than CDC material we read directly. And we have reproduced no material published by medical journals, professional societies or private research bodies, which is their copyrighted work rather than public information.

Common questions, answered

General information, not legal or medical advice. What a claim recovers and how long you have are set state by state, so check anything here against your own state and your own attorney.