Fort Lauderdale Paralysis Lawyer

Paralysis in any of its several forms inflicts emotional trauma along with physical inabilities and financial obstacles. If the injury was caused by an individual or a business, the path to receiving compensation begins by meeting with the Ft. Lauderdale paralysis lawyer who can aggressively fight on your behalf. An experienced catastrophic injury attorney can help you collect relevant evidence and witnesses that can contribute to a beneficial outcome of your lawsuit.

Frequency of Incapacity

Each year in the US, some 12,000 people sustain an injury to the spinal cord, according to the Shepherd Center, a not-for-profit hospital noted for research, rehabilitation, and treatment for paralysis sufferers. Most of them, 82 percent, are men ranging between 16 and 30 years old.

Spinal cord injuries happen most often in vehicle crashes, 36 percent, followed by violence, 28.9 percent, and falling down, 21.2 percent. Other causes are illnesses, such as polio and strokes, according to the Shepherd Center.

Ft. Lauderdale paralysis lawyers have seen cases where brain injuries can also cause incapacity if the brain cannot send signals to the spinal cord. Spinal cord injuries cause paralysis beginning where the spinal cord is severed or partially severed. Paralysis is termed complete when signals stop at the point of injury and incomplete meaning some signals are getting through.

What Types of Paralysis can Someone Suffer?

• Four types of paralysis can happen, they include:
• Monoplegia: disabling one arm or one leg
• Hemiplegia: affecting an arm and a leg on the same side
• Paraplegia: when both legs lose mobility
• Quadriplegia: when patients cannot move both arms and both legs

What are the Financial Costs of Paralysis?

Not even a full one percent of paralysis patients are recovered completely when their hospital discharges them, according to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. The others will face extensive costs.

For example, a quadriplegic person who was 25 years old at the time of the injury will require $4.7 million in care over a lifetime, but that figure does not include income and benefits that are lost because of the injury, according to the Spinal Cord Injury Model System.

Recovering Damages

People who are paralyzed may sue for damages under Florida’s negligence law, with the assistance of a Ft. Lauderdale paralysis lawyer. The law defines negligence as someone behaving in a way that harms others. Florida reduces the amount of damages by how much a person was at fault in causing the injury. If the injured person was in an automobile accident and had 20 percent of fault in causing the wreck, damages are reduced by 20 percent.

Someone without any fault recovers all damages. The percentage of fault is determined by a jury or the court if a jury is not impaneled. Proving negligence centers on duty of care, the first of four elements that comprise this law. Drivers share the road and owe it to each other not to cause a collision. A connection must exist between the two parties, and if that is not met, a duty of care is not owed. Someone who sees a stranger drowning will not have a duty of care toward that person in trouble unless an attempt to rescue is made. Negligence law is complex, but the Ft. Lauderdale paralysis lawyer can evaluate how strong a case is after speaking with the injured person during a free, no-obligation consultation.