[Transcript] If you’ve been seriously injured in a crash or in a farming accident or other type of issue where someone else has caused your injuries, you’re coming into a pretty complex area of law known as personal injury. When you do that, you need a team of dedicated personal injury trial attorneys by your side, to help you navigate this process.
When people come in for a no-fee, completely free of charge consultation for us to go over the facts of their personal injury case, I always want to make sure that I’m trying to demystify this complex area of law for them. One of the best ways I feel I can do that is to go through the three basic building blocks of a personal injury case.
That’s liability (who’s fault is it), damages (how have you been damaged and what’s the amount that you need to recover to be made whole), and causation. In this video, I want to talk about causation. What, what is it? Obviously, liability, if we’re in a car crash, someone rear-ends you, you think that they’re at fault, that’s who is at fault. Damages, you know, it’s about adding up your medical bills, pain and suffering, lost wages, but causation is what connects liability to your damages. So it’s pretty clear to understand that if someone has injured you, they’re only paying for the damages that they actually caused. So we have to show that if you have a broken leg that broken leg happened because of the car crash and not because you broke it before you got in the car and were on the way to the hospital when you got hit.
That can be easier in some cases, obviously, than others. If you were getting in your car and your arm wasn’t broken, you were in a crash and your arm was broken, that’s a pretty demonstrable injury that’s connected to the crash that you were in. However, there are types of injuries that can be more difficult to prove, and take an experienced trial attorney to make sure that we’ve talked to the correct experts and we can present the information in the best way to show how that’s connected to the crash that you were in. A good example of this could be a disc herniation in your spine.
So you can think of your spine as having the bony vertebrae that go up your spinal column but between each of those bones is a disc of jelly-like fluid and that’s kind of the shock absorber for your body, that’s what your back is made up of. If you’re in a crash and you have a physical injury to your back, what can actually happen is what’s called the annulus, the skin of that jelly disc can actually tear, and some of that jelly can be extruded out and can push on your spinal cord. This can cause pain, discomfort, it can cause tingling in your arms or your legs or other parts of your body, numbness in parts of your body. It can be a lot for someone to have to deal with, especially if it happened because of something that wasn’t your fault. But this can be sometimes a tricky issue to show that it was from the actual crash.
A lot of time, these symptoms don’t show up for sometimes weeks or months after the crash, because it takes a while for that jelly and the disc to extrude and push on the nerves enough for you to start to notice, but can get worse over time. These are also injuries that can come from a lot of different things. People can have this type of injury and other areas of their life. So having an experienced attorney that has dealt with these types of cases or other difficult causation cases in the past, know how to present those to a jury, know how to be persuasive to an insurance adjuster and their defense counsel on the other side, that this crash caused this injury, is vitally important for you to recover what you need to because you were hurt by someone else.
As I said, here at Bennett, Boehning, and Clary, we offer a free, absolutely no-cost consultation for you to come in and talk to us about the strengths and potential weaknesses of your personal injury case.
We also make sure that you don’t pay us anything in attorney fees unless we actually recover money for you. As I’ve said, we have a dedicated team of personal injury trial attorneys, ready to help you here at BB&C. Because at BB&C, we’re here for you and here for life, whatever that might bring.
Disclaimer: The content of this blog is intended to be general and informational in nature. It is advertising material and is not intended to be, nor is it, legal advice to or for any particular person, case, or circumstance. Each situation is different, and you should consult an attorney if you have any questions about your situation.
