Common Questions / Fracture Injuries
What is a broken bone case worth? The 'just a fracture' myth
Insurers price fractures as six weeks in a cast. Real fractures involve surgical hardware, months of rehabilitation, hardware-removal surgeries still to come, and, for breaks that enter a joint, the quiet certainty of post-traumatic arthritis years down the road, future damages the early settlement never mentions.
What a serious fracture actually is
The phrase clean break belongs to movies. Crash-force fractures shatter, displace, and open through skin; they are fixed with plates, screws, rods, and external frames in surgeries with their own risks; and they heal on a schedule the body sets, with real rates of complication, infection around hardware, nonunion where bone refuses to knit, malunion where it knits wrong and must be re-broken to be re-fixed. The recovery is not the cast; it is the months of therapy relearning the use of a limb, the strength that returns incompletely, the hardware that stays behind aching in cold weather or comes out in yet another operation. A case priced at the emergency room bill has priced the first chapter of a book.
The sleeper: fractures that enter a joint
The most undervalued injury in this practice is the intra-articular fracture, a break extending into the surface of an ankle, knee, wrist, hip, or shoulder joint. However well the surgeon rebuilds it, a damaged joint surface wears wrong, and medicine has a name for what follows: post-traumatic arthritis, arriving three, ten, twenty years later as stiffness, pain, and, for many, an eventual joint replacement. Texas law compensates that future now, when a qualified surgeon testifies the arthritis and its treatment are reasonably probable, and the difference between a file that contains that testimony and one that does not is routinely the largest number in the case. It is also precisely the future the adjuster's cast-off settlement call is engineered to buy before anyone prices it.
Building the fracture case properly
The proof stack is satisfyingly concrete: the imaging series from ER through healing, the operative reports and hardware inventory, therapy records charting the plateau, work restrictions as they resolve or don't, and, decisively, the treating surgeon's opinions on permanent impairment, future hardware removal, and long-term joint prognosis. Scarring from surgical incisions and external fixators is disfigurement, a separate compensable element people forget to claim. And the timing rule from elsewhere on this site applies with force here: fracture cases resolve at maximum medical improvement, when the futures can be named, not at cast removal, when they conveniently cannot.
Before you take the early number
If the offer arrived while you were still in a boot, it was calculated on the hope you would not learn what this page says. Silver Key Law prices fractures on the whole arc, hardware to arthritis, and the consultation that re-runs the math is free.
Injured in Arizona? Some rules on this page are Texas-specific. Arizona differs on points that change outcomes, including pure comparative fault and government-claim deadlines. See our Arizona answers or call (888) 508-6967.
Related: Common Crash Injuries · Maximum Medical Improvement · Submit Your Case · All Common Questions
This page is general information about Texas law, not legal advice about your specific situation. Deadlines and outcomes depend on facts; talk to a lawyer about yours.
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