San Francisco Injury Attorney Blog

There have been many reports in the news lately about links between playing professional football and early onset of dementia. Now, according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Congress is investigating. All this recent attention started with a New Yorker Magazine piece about the high number of pro football players with dementia, often misdiagnosed as Altzheimer's.

None of these reports will come as much of a surprise to personal injury lawyers who have handled traumatic brain injury (TBI) cases. We know that just one concussion can cause a TBI with permanent effects. While most people who have continuing symptoms after a concussion make a complete recovery, a minority of people do not, and are left with permanent impairments. These impairments often include forgetfulness, difficulty finding the right words, and irritability. That this type of permanent injury can result from even a minor concussion makes it obvious that pro football players, who will usually have many concussions over a career, are likely to have a high rate of TBIs.

Appropriate testing can be hard to come by for NFL players too. The New Yorker story points out that often players are seen by a team physician, who works for management, and is under pressure to get the player back on the field.

Many of these injuries are subtle, and don't have physical manifestations that show up on diagnostic image tests, such as CAT scans or MRIs. The damage to the brain is so physically subtle that it often only shows up on autopsy. The New Yorker Magazine piece details how numerous brain autopsies involving football players showed what had happened to their brains.

These milder TBIs have their own name, MTBI--for Mild Traumatic Brain Injury. Many people who are injured in an accident don't even realize that they have an MTBI. Friends, family member, and co-workers often fill in the gaps, and can be important sources of information about the problems that the person is having. Sometimes the person suffering from the injury thinks he or she is functioning well, only to hear from others that they are much different after an accident.

Since these MTBI injuries do not show up on standard image tests, the diagnosis is most often made by testing performed by a type of psychologist called a neuropsychologist. In the San Francisco Bay area, we have many talented neuropsychologists, but getting health insurers to pay for the extensive testing needed can be difficult.

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Wrongful Death verdicts and settlements in the San Francisco Bay area and throughout the state have gone up a lot in recent years. This is one of the very few areas where juries seem to be more generous today than they were ten years ago. A recent verdict against a radio station in Sacramento, California makes this point.

As reported in a CBS news story, one of the participants in station KDND's contest, entitled "Hold your Wee for a WII," Jennifer Strange, died from water intoxication after drinking massive amounts of water, but not urinating, in order to win an endurance contest. Water intoxication is a little-known condition, often affecting runners who go overboard in their efforts to drink enough water in a marathon.

In the KDND case, the victim was a mother of three children, and was trying to win a WII for her kids. The verdict is especially large for case where the victim was not someone who pulls down a large income. A big part of the money recovered in many wrongful death cases is for anticipated future earnings of the person who died. So, in casese that do not have punitive damages, it's not common to see such a large verdice for someone without high earnings.

Why are awards up so much for wrongful death cases? I'd like to think it's because juries are placing a higher value on the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything to support that. I never understood how wrongful death verdicts could be so low in the past, and of course some still are. It's hard for a family to accept it when a jury finds that their loved one's death was caused by another person or a company, but then values their loss at, say, $200,000.

What I think is driving up verdicts in some cases is the sense of outrage at the conduct that caused the death. In the Sacramento California case, it's easy to see how a jury could be appalled at the radio station for conducting such this contest. Also, when the jury knows that a big corporation is behind a someone getting sued can often relieve any juror's worries about bankrupting a person or small business.

Continue reading "Remarkable $16.5 million Wrongful Death Verdict - Sacramento radio station contest" »