Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal cord injury is one of the most challenging areas in personal injury litigations. Leading causes of spinal cord injuries are from automobile accidents and falls. In a serious case, spinal cord injury can result in permanent disability or paralysis.

MR. THOMAS L. GOWEN: Spinal cord injury is one of the most challenging areas of personal injury litigation because of the seriousness of the harm that occurs to individuals who suffer this injury. It's important to understand the anatomy and the consequences of this kind of injury in order to properly handle these cases. The spinal cord is basically the connection between the brain and the rest of the body, and it's an integral part of the central nervous system. Signals are absent from the brain down through the spinal cord to the rest of the body that enables the body to move parts, to feel things and to actually have the fundamental functions of the body operate such as breathing, bladder and bowel control and many other things. So an injury to the spinal cord can be quite serious. The higher in the cord that the injury occurs, generally, the more serious the problems can be because everything below it can be damaged by that injury. So an injury to the neck or the cervical portion of the spinal cord can cause a person to become a quadriplegic or have diminished function in all of the body parts below that level. If the injury occurs at the waist area or the lumbar area, the injury may be limited to those parts below that, such as the legs. The cause of spinal cord injury, and there are a frightening number of these injuries each year, are highest among automobile accident victims, and they may be caused by the negligence of another driver, or the lack of crash worthiness of a car in a rollover or tire failures, for example. The next highest cause is falls, and that may be caused by a lack of fall protection at a job. Violence is a very high cause, and sports injury tends to be an area where there is a lot of spinal cord injury. These usually occur where there are dangerous products, such as backyard swimming pools, diving boards or trampolines, which all contribute to the toll of spinal cord injury in the United States. The other areas where you have these kinds of injuries in sports, where there's inadequate supervision or no supervision, and it could be in football, could be gymnastics, it could be in cheerleading, are areas where there are some significant spinal cord injuries. These cases are challenging because they have to be developed from both the liability and damage standpoint, and the liability depends upon who is at fault, and we look very hard at developing the case to prove against the negligent party. In a simple car accident, that part may be easy, but in every other case, they tend to be sophisticated cases of liability. Then there is the question of proving the damages, because the damages are very significant and include many things that most people wouldn't even think about because they involve a lifetime of care if it's a serious spinal cord injury. We have to develop life care plans that cost out the medical treatment that will be necessary for a lifetime in oftentimes a young person who suffers this kind of injury. So these are very challenging cases and very rewarding cases when we do them successfully, because they are very helpful to our clients who are frequently left destitute by this very serious injury.