Getting into a car accident is a frightening experience that can lead to pain, expensive medical treatment, lost wages, and an uncertain future. However, you may be able to recover compensation by bringing a lawsuit against the party responsible for the accident.
If you are pursuing legal action for a car accident that caused serious injuries, your attorney will likely be consulting with medical experts. Drawing on years of training and knowledge, seasoned medical experts are able to offer testimony about the plaintiff’s medical condition and prognosis and link the accident to specific injuries. In doing so, a qualified medical expert will explain this aspect of the case in a way that a jury can easily digest.
The defense often retains their own medical experts as well. Learn more about the role of medical experts in personal injury lawsuits and how we can leverage their testimony to strengthen your case.
In This Article:
- How Do Medical Experts Enhance a Car Accident Case?
- How We Assess the Defense’s Medical Experts
- Our Approach to Preexisting Injury Allegations in Car Accident Cases
- Case Study: $1,750,000 Settlement for Car Accident Victim With a Prior Back Injury
How Do Medical Experts Enhance a Car Accident Case?
Car accident cases can require medical experts from nearly any field, but most commonly include orthopedic surgeons (who specialize in the musculoskeletal system), neurologists (who specialize in treatment of the brain, spinal cord, and nerves), physiatrists (who specialize in nonsurgical musculoskeletal care), and pain management doctors. As expert witnesses, they can play a pivotal role in presenting your car accident case.
Sharing Credible Evidence
Medical experts provide us with reports and testimony, which are important sources of evidence in a lawsuit. Contrary to lay witnesses, who can only testify about facts they observed, experts can go one step further and offer opinions grounded in their medical knowledge and experience. Their expertise helps us prove certain facts about the injuries and lends more credibility to our arguments.
Ideally, our client’s treating physician will testify and offer the jury insight into their treatment and diagnosis. Since they’ve likely seen their patient multiple times, they’re a highly valuable source of information on the plaintiff’s medical condition.
However, if that’s not possible — and in some instances, even when it is possible — we can turn to a retained expert to bolster the plaintiff’s case. The retained expert will conduct their own exam of the plaintiff and review all previous medical documentation related to the injury.
Proving Damages
A personal injury lawsuit will be dismissed if we don’t provide evidence for the damages portion, which must prove that the car accident caused the plaintiff’s injuries. New York law requires that a plaintiff meet the “serious injury threshold” in order to successfully bring a car accident case. This is also when we discuss compensation for our client, which is based on both economic damages such as medical expenses and lost wages, and non-economic damages like pain and suffering.
Testimony from doctors can help us with the following points:
- Severity of the injuries. An effective lawyer will utilize an expert to persuade the jury that their client was injured. But it amounts to much more than that. Expert medical testimony will discuss the medical diagnosis and both the short and long-term effects of the injury on daily life, the ability to participate in activities, and how the injury may progress over time.
- Cause of the injuries. We describe the accident to the medical expert and ask their opinion on whether it could have caused the patient’s injuries.
- Exam findings. We ask the doctor to discuss any exams they performed and what they revealed about the plaintiff’s condition. Our client’s testimony will appear more credible if the doctor confirms their symptoms are correlated with objective medical findings, such as involuntary muscle spasms or MRIs.
- Physical limitations. Unfortunately, some plaintiffs can’t resume the same level of activity they had prior to the accident. A doctor can assess whether a plaintiff can safely return to work and other functions, or if doing so would cause their condition to deteriorate further.
- Future medical care. Some injuries never heal, and most degenerate with age. Medical experts can discuss whether the plaintiff will require additional treatments such as physical therapy or revision surgery, which can impact the value of the case.
Effective Witnesses
It’s very important that our medical experts are not only credible, but effective witnesses if the case goes to trial. Our lawyers ask the doctor to stand right in front of the jury and explain the relevant injuries simply and clearly, using schematic drawings of the human body or anatomical models that we bring to court as a visual reference. This hands-on style helps the jury learn and understand the science and medicine behind our arguments. It’s also essential for the lawyers to take the time to learn from the experts so that they’re well-versed on the medical issues they’re asking the jury to consider.
How We Assess the Defense’s Medical Experts
Medical experts retained by the defense typically ground their opinions in well-established principles which serve the interests of those who hired them. For that reason, our experienced attorneys focus not only on attacking the science behind their claims, but on scrutinizing the expert’s credibility and the context in which their opinions are offered.
Check For Potential Biases
When we cross-examine doctors, we’ll ask them how long they’ve been doing expert work, which side they’ve been doing it for, and how much money they’ve earned from working on the defense side. If they admit they’ve only worked for the defense side for many years and have made a huge sum of money from testifying, it will call their objectivity into question.
Expose Flaws in Their Report
Medical experts retained by the defense will examine our client, but they’re usually doing a dozen or more litigation examinations per day, which often leads to careless mistakes. Sometimes they will even fail to review all of the relevant medical records before generating their opinion and finalizing their report, which is then based on an incomplete set of facts. This shows they weren’t motivated to offer a fair, balanced, and complete opinion. We’ll examine their report closely to check if it’s as thorough and objective as ours, often contrasting the reports to show important distinctions between the experts.
Our Approach to Preexisting Injury Allegations in Car Accident Cases
Some injuries are straightforward and clearly linked to the accident, such as bone fractures. However, other injuries are more often disputed by the defense, whose expert may believe that they were preexisting and not caused by the car accident. This is especially true with soft tissue injuries, like tears in the knees, shoulders, elbows, or wrists, and injuries to the discs and nerves of the spine.
Many plaintiff attorneys will argue that a soft tissue injury happened at the moment of impact, which can be difficult to prove without a pre-accident MRI for comparison. Our firm tends to take a different approach.
We don’t dispute that some injuries can be degenerative. Instead, we examine the activity levels of the person prior to the accident to show that even if they had degeneration, it was not causing them any problems. If they were previously able to work and exercise with little to no pain, and now they’re not capable of that, we can conclude that the accident was the cause of the symptoms that now require medical treatment.
Case Study: $1,750,000 Settlement for Car Accident Victim With a Prior Back Injury
While preexisting injuries can complicate a case, we’ve still achieved excellent results for these clients with the help of medical experts.
In one case handled by Partners Jeffrey A. Block and S. Joseph Donahue, our client was a lineworker for a telephone company whose job duties included placing cable lines and poles. He had previously herniated a disc in a work accident, but was eventually able to return to work following conservative treatment.
A Car Accident Exacerbates Preexisting Injuries
Unfortunately, our client’s spine was injured again eight years later when he was rear-ended while stopped in traffic, exacerbating his previous condition. When he returned to work this time, he was unable to resume his previous job functions and could only do “light duty” such as filing paperwork. He underwent disc replacement surgery and ultimately had to stop working altogether because of his ongoing pain. Our client also struggled with everyday tasks like dressing himself, and was forced to give up coaching his son’s baseball team and going to church.
Our damages claims included past and future pain and suffering, past and future lost wages and union benefits, and past and future medical expenses. In the early stages of negotiating, the defense’s insurance adjuster was reluctant to meet our demands for compensation due to our client’s prior back injury, questioning the connection between the car accident and his current spinal issues. However, we were able to overcome this challenge with the help of medical experts.
Linking Medical Evidence to Our Claims
Three of the client’s treating physicians, including his orthopedic spine surgeon, agreed to serve as expert witnesses in the case to discuss the severe and permanent nature of his injuries. We also submitted their reports for evidence — including MRIs, surgical records, and physical exams showing decreased range of motion — which aligned with our client’s ongoing symptoms.
Returning to work as a lineman would have required the ability to lift over 50 pounds and climb at least 10 feet up a pole. At his deposition, our client testified that two of his doctors had advised him not to lift over 20 pounds. He also shared that he had previously taken every opportunity he could to work overtime and used to be able to persevere through the aches and pains of such a physical job. It was clear that was no longer possible after the car accident worsened his existing back injury.
Our evidence was persuasive and the case settled for $1,750,000 prior to trial.
Consult a Personal Injury Attorney Today
If you’ve been seriously injured in a car accident, the attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy are here to help. Contact us for a free legal consultation by calling 212-736-5300, or by filling out our online form. We serve all five boroughs of New York City as well as the entirety of New York State and New Jersey.