Some injuries never fully heal. We work with treating physicians, life care planners, and economists to document the lifetime cost of care, lost earnings, and home modifications a family will carry.
We represent catastrophically injured people and their families from our offices in Springfield and Westfield. A new injury reaches a real person 24 hours a day at (413) 426-8657; the first conversation is free.
What changes when an injury is permanent
The law does not change. A brain injury case and a broken wrist case are both negligence cases, decided by the same rules about duty, fault, and causation.
What changes is what has to be proven. In an ordinary case, the damages are mostly historical: here is the treatment, here is what it cost, here is the work that was missed. In a catastrophic case the damages are mostly in the future, and the future has to be established by evidence rather than asserted. What will attendant care cost in year twelve? What would this person have earned over a career that is now gone? What does a wheelchair-accessible bathroom cost, and how often is the van replaced?
That is why these cases involve a team rather than a lawyer and a file.
The cost of settling before the picture is clear
Insurers make early offers in catastrophic cases, and those offers are often larger than anything the family has ever been shown at once. The pressure to take one is enormous and completely understandable: the bills are real, the income has stopped, and the offer is on the table today.
The problem is that a settlement is permanent and the injury is not yet finished revealing itself. Until the treating physicians can say where function is going to plateau - what will come back, what will not, what secondary conditions are likely - nobody can price the case, including us. An offer made before that point is priced on the insurer's hope for a good recovery, and once accepted it cannot be reopened when the hope proves wrong.
Where the cash-flow problem is genuine, and it usually is, the answer is to solve it directly: personal injury protection and health coverage for the medical side, short and long-term disability, and in some circumstances an advance against the case. Those are solvable. An early settlement is not reversible.
Protecting the benefits that pay for the care
This is the part families are most often blindsided by, and it is the reason to involve counsel early rather than at the end.
A large sum of money arriving in a bank account can disqualify an injured person from MassHealth and Supplemental Security Income - the programs that may be paying for the very care the settlement is meant to fund. Where Medicare has paid or will pay, its interest has to be accounted for as part of the resolution.
None of that is a reason to accept less. It is a reason to plan the shape of the recovery before it arrives: a properly drafted special needs trust, a structured settlement that pays over time rather than at once, and a set-aside where one is required. Planned in advance, this is routine. Discovered afterwards, it is a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe.
Finding what will actually pay
Serious injuries exhaust ordinary policy limits almost immediately, so an early priority is establishing what coverage exists at all: the primary liability policy, any umbrella or excess layer above it, a commercial policy if a business or an employee was involved, underinsured motorist coverage on the injured person's own auto policy, and any premises or contractor coverage in play.
We also look hard at who else is responsible. Catastrophic cases frequently have more than one defendant - a driver and the company that put them on the road, a property owner and the contractor who built the thing that failed - and the second defendant is often where the coverage is.
What to do now
Keep every record, and start a file: bills, benefit letters, mileage to appointments, the names of every provider. Ask the family member with the clearest head to keep a short daily note on what the injured person can and cannot do - months later, that record does work no medical chart can, because it captures the ordinary things that were lost.
And call before speaking with any insurer, including your own. The first conversation is free, and in a case of this size the early decisions are the ones that cannot be undone.