Cost of a Traumatic Brain Injury Case

Answer:

Here at Morgenstern & Herd, we handle traumatic brain injury cases. One of the questions that comes up repeatedly with our clients is how much it is going to cost to litigate my traumatic brain injury case. In traumatic brain injuries, we have specialized areas, so we need certain kinds of experts to make sure that the – if we need to, we can have a neurologist, a neuropsychologist, depending on the extent of the brain injury, explain those damages to a jury, so they do cost more. Even when you have treating physicians who are on your health insurance, the medical bills may be covered by health insurance, and that will reduce the repayment of those bills, but in order to take the specialist, neurologist, neuropsychologist, out of their practice and into the courtroom or into a deposition to establish your damages, we have to pay them hourly for their time. Neurologists and neuropsychologists charge anywhere from $400 per hour for preparation and deposition, upwards of $1000 an hour, so it depends on your particular case. If on the liability side you’ve got a car accident, we need an accident reconstructionist. We may need engineers as well to establish the causal link between the incident and your traumatic brain injury. Yes, they cost more, but, under the bar rules, we’re able to front the expenses for those things. If we don’t make a recovery against the at-fault party, we don’t get the money that we paid to the experts back. We write it off, and that’s why we take a contingency fee, and the contingency fees, as laid out by Florida law, are the extent that they are, between 33.3% and 40%. We would like to be able to tell you we’ve never lost any cases ever in our lives, but that’s just not true, so we have written off hundreds of thousands of dollars in cases where the jury didn’t agree with us. It’s fortunately not a frequent event, but ever trial lawyer has lost a case or they’re not a trial lawyer. At Morgenstern & Herd, we’ll do the best to minimize the expense in your traumatic brain injury case.