Wrongful Death & Catastrophic Injury

A death. A brain injury that leaves someone able to hold a conversation and unable to hold a job. A spinal cord injury, an amputation, a burn requiring reconstruction across a working lifetime. Harm that will not be undone and has to be paid for over the rest of a life.

These are not a separate kind of liability. The collision, the missed diagnosis, the defective machine or the unsafe site is still the case that has to be proven. What changes is that the second half — what the harm is worth — becomes as much work as the first.

A serious injury that resolves is a different matter and often a better fit elsewhere. The distinction that puts a case here is permanence, not how bad it looked on the day.

The size of a permanent loss is proven, not asserted. A life-care plan built by a clinician who has examined the person, an economist to reduce it to present value, vocational analysis of what work remains possible, and treating physicians willing to say what the rest of the medical course looks like.

The defence will retain its own. The distance between two life-care plans is frequently the entire contested question in a case where liability is not seriously in doubt. That work is expensive, it happens before value is known, and it is where an underfunded case quietly loses.

Timing matters as much as expense. A plan built before the medical picture has stabilised understates the case. One built late arrives after everyone else in the room has already valued the file.

A wrongful death claim is statutory, and the statute decides who may bring it, who may recover and what may be recovered. A survival claim covering what the person experienced before death is a separate claim with a separate measure. The two are commonly pleaded together and then treated as though they were one.

An estate usually has to be opened and a representative appointed before anything can be filed, and allocation among survivors may require court approval. None of that is difficult. All of it takes time, and the limitation period is not extended to accommodate it.

These rules differ materially between states, which is one reason a death claim governed by another state's law is brought with co-counsel admitted there rather than adapted from a familiar form.

The catastrophic case is the one most likely to be undervalued by the firm holding it, because the liability work looks finished while the damages work has not started. A file with clear liability and an unbuilt life-care plan is not a resolved case. It is a case the other side has been left to price.

Referrals in this category often arrive at exactly that point. Coming in as co-counsel while the medical course is still developing is generally more useful than arriving with a mediation date already set.