Ohio Association for Justice podcast features attorney Steve Gursten on winning strategies for the car accident lawyer with TBI cases
Far too many lawyers steer away from TBI cases.
I’m not one of them.
I was recently on the Ohio Association for Justice’s podcast, Civilly Speaking, where I talked with OAJ President-Elect Sean Harris about what personal injury lawyers need to know in order to take and win TBI cases.
Our podcast episode, which was entitled “Taking Traumatic Brain Injury Cases and Winning,” was recorded at the Ohio Association for Justice’s 2017 Winter Convention in Cleveland where I was the plenary speaker.
In addition to the recording, here is also a transcript of the podcast episode.
The podcast follows my presentation on helping lawyers to prove TBI in motor vehicle crash cases at the Ohio Association for Justice’s 2017 Winter legal Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
Winning strategies for car accident attorneys in TBI cases
Here are the highlights of what I covered during my OAJ podcast episode, “Taking Traumatic Brain Injury Cases and Winning”:
- “[T]he new science with brain injuries is showing that loss of consciousness is not the best indicator … that you want to look, instead, on the severity of initial brain function impairment … [T]hat means post traumatic amnesia, confusion, other symptoms of brain injury [such as inflammation] matter far more than any initial curative loss of consciousness …”
- When asked “[w]hat words” he uses to describe TBI, Steve explained: “I always like organic brain damage. That has been shown to be the most effective. Post-concussion syndrome doesn’t really mean much … [T]rying to simplify these cases with your experts and the medicine is the best advice I can give.”
- “This applies to every case, not just brain injury, but you have to be different from everybody else … in a lot of my brain injury cases I use a plaintiff independent medical examiner and it drives these defense lawyers crazy because they’ve never seen it before.”
- As for how lawyers can show juries the full extent to which traumatic brain injuries affect car accident victims’ lives, Steve explained: “[Y]ou want to make sure that you’re … doing three things in every [TBI] case … One … [y]ou always want to have the jury being able in deliberations to point at something that has been marked as an exhibit that they can look at and say that’s why we’re here … Number two … you really want to explain why this [traumatic brain injury] matters … why this is important … [T]hird … you have to show lifestyle impact and why it matters to your client because it’s not enough to talk about disability or pain since those are intangible terms. You have to make them tangible and the way you flush them out and make them real for people on a jury is by showing the ten different ways that your clients life is [significantly] different now than it was before …”
