Wear Trial Law represents people whose injuries permanently change what their life will look like — traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, amputation, severe burns, and multiple trauma. These cases are not larger versions of ordinary injury claims. They require proving what the next forty years will cost, which is a fundamentally different kind of case to build.
What makes an injury catastrophic
Not severity alone, but permanence. The question is whether the person will need care, accommodation, or support indefinitely, and whether their capacity to work and to live independently has been permanently altered.
That distinction changes everything about how the case is prepared, because the largest component of the claim is not what has already been spent. It is what will be needed.
Proving the future
Life care planning. A life care planner works with treating physicians to project what the person will need across their lifetime — surgeries, therapy, medication, durable medical equipment and its replacement cycles, attendant care, home modification, and transportation.
Economic loss. An economist establishes lost earning capacity, not merely lost wages — including the career trajectory that is now foreclosed — and reduces lifetime costs to present value.
Vocational assessment. What work, if any, remains realistically available.
Day-in-the-life evidence. Testimony describes limitation abstractly. Showing what a morning actually requires does something testimony cannot.
Traumatic brain injury deserves particular attention
TBI is the injury most frequently undervalued, because the people most affected by it are often the least able to describe it, and because imaging is frequently normal.
Cognitive and personality changes — irritability, executive function loss, memory failure, fatigue — are devastating to a family and invisible on a scan. These cases are proven through neuropsychological testing and through the testimony of people who knew the person before: a spouse, an employer, a longtime colleague. That evidence has to be gathered deliberately, and early.
Finding the insurance
A catastrophic case is frequently worth far more than the obvious policy. Identifying every available source is central to the work: excess and umbrella coverage, employer coverage where the at-fault party was working, commercial policies, other liable parties, and the injured person’s own underinsured motorist coverage.
Liens and net recovery
Medi-Cal, Medicare, ERISA plans, and hospitals may all assert reimbursement rights. In catastrophic cases these are large, and negotiating them is not administrative cleanup — it materially determines what the family actually receives. Where future medical needs are ongoing, structured settlements and set-aside arrangements may also need to be part of the resolution.
Call 415-233-9688 for a free consultation.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ
Typically longer than other cases. Settling before the medical picture stabilizes almost always undervalues the claim.
That may signal the claim exceeds the policy. Do not accept before other coverage is identified.
Yes, through the appropriate representative.
Speak with an attorney promptly. Timing and case framing affect what is recoverable.
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