How are spinal cord injury cases handled, and what do they require?

What the injury is, and why level is everything

The spinal cord carries every instruction the brain sends below the injury, so the level of damage, cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and its completeness, whether any signal crosses, draw the map of the life that follows: tetraplegia or paraplegia, the hands that do or do not work, the breathing that does or does not need help, bladder and bowel function, skin that can no longer feel pressure warning it. Incomplete injuries hold genuine hope and genuine uncertainty, function returns on its own schedule across the first year or more, which is one of several reasons these cases are never priced early. And the diagnosis is only the opening chapter: the medically expected companions, pressure injuries, urinary and respiratory complications, the blood-pressure emergency called autonomic dysreflexia in higher injuries, are foreseeable, preventable with resources, and fully compensable as part of the future.

The case must be the size of the life

Published registries put the lifetime cost of a spinal cord injury in the millions, front-loaded in the first year and continuing every year after, and the legal work is making that arithmetic undeniable: the life care plan inventorying attendant care, hours honestly counted whether strangers or family provide them, because a wife's care is compensable at market rates and caregivers age; equipment on real replacement cycles, chairs, cushions, lifts, standing frames, the accessible van; the home modified or replaced; medications, supplies, therapies, and the periodic hospitalizations the complications guarantee; and beside it the economist's work, the earning capacity of the life that was planned, reduced to present value. Every element of the future-damages standard described elsewhere on this site operates here at maximum stakes, and the defense's counter-plan, fewer hours, cheaper chairs, shorter life expectancy, is met with physician foundations and candor.

Where liability hides, and why the search is wide

These injuries arrive by crash, by fall, by shallow water, by violence, by medicine, and the liability investigation runs as wide as the damages: the crash case examined for the crashworthiness case inside it, ejections, roof crush, failed restraints, since the enhancement is often the paralysis itself; the fall traced through the premises doctrines; the assault through negligent security; the pool through the layers on its own page. A defendant list one name long, against damages this size, is usually an investigation that stopped early, and coverage mapping, every policy, every layer, is first-month work.

For the person and family carrying this

The case will run alongside rehabilitation, at a pace that respects it, and it exists for one purpose: to fund the decades properly, once, because there is no returning for more. Silver Key Law builds spinal cord cases to that scale, and the consultation, wherever and however it is easiest to have it, 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: Catastrophic Injury Cases · Life Care Plans · 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.