Virginia Personal Injury Lawyer Protects TBI Survivors’ Legal Rights to Get Paid for Their Losses
Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) can devastate more than just physical and emotional health. Survivors of brain injuries are sometimes forced to accept jobs that pay far less than their previous roles. The financial strain of reduced earning potential greatly exacerbates an already challenging road to recovery.
Compassionate to the profound effect of such circumstances, our Virginia brain injury lawyers at The Mottley Law Firm fight tirelessly to secure the funds necessary to cover medical costs and lost wages, both current and well into the future. Take action today to hold liable parties accountable and regain the financial stability you need.
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Accounting for Diminished Earning Capacity After a TBI
After suffering any type of traumatic brain injury, survivors may experience a myriad of symptoms. TBI victims may recuperate from some of these symptoms in a few weeks or months with proper treatment. By filing a personal injury lawsuit, they may be able to recover lost wages from not working during this healing and rehabilitation period.
Something that many TBI survivors overlook, however, is the long-lasting impact of their brain injuries. They may never fully recover from their symptoms, resulting in diminished lifelong earnings. It’s not just one or two missed paychecks: it’s the difference between what they would have earned without the accident and what they can earn now that they suffered a traumatic brain injury.
In especially severe cases, people who have suffered a brain injury may not return to work at all. Often, though, TBI survivors return to lower-paying jobs than they had held previously. The lost earning capacity is due to a range of impairments they may now experience, such as:
- Impaired gross and fine motor skills
- Difficulty standing, walking, and other mobility issues
- Vision problems, like blurry vision and heightened light sensitivity
- Other sensory issues, such as hearing and balance
- Language and communication problems
- Emotional dysregulation and poor impulse control
- Short-term memory loss and deficiencies
- Cognitive issues, like reasoning, planning, and problem-solving
- Challenges in learning new skills and procedures
- Behavioral and personality issues, such as depression and anxiety
For example, let’s say you’re on the sales team of a car dealership, and always had the ability to deliver increasingly impressive sales numbers. You were next in line to be promoted to department management later in your career but then suffered a traumatic brain injury. Because of complications from your TBI, like the ones referenced above, you’re able to work, but now in more of a clerk position, and that’s as high as you’ll advance. You can draw similar projections for other career trajectories.
Considering the Full Compensation Package From Work
When contemplating the impact of traumatic brain injuries and diminished earning capacity, it’s important to factor in all forms of pay an employee may receive from their job. After a slip and fall brain injury, you may lose out on not only your base salary or hourly wage. The effects of this accident can extend to performance bonuses, future raises, health benefits, paid time off (PTO), and other forms of compensation. Reduced earning capacity also compromises the size of your pension, as it’s not uncommon for brain injury survivors to retire earlier for health reasons than they would have without the TBI.
Using the car salesperson example above, it’s impossible to predict with certainty where your career would have gone had you not suffered a TBI, as there’s always some level of speculation involved. However, based on our experience with numerous cases like these, the traumatic injury brain team at The Mottley Law Firm will examine, collect, and present evidence to support this speculation. We’ll describe how your TBI may affect your earning capacity for the remainder of your career. These projections are vital for fairly evaluating the possible worth of a personal injury claim.
How to Calculate Lifetime Reduced Earnings
While it’s impossible to definitively predict the exact value of reduced earnings over a lifetime, it is possible to calculate a reasonable estimate for lost income. This differs from calculating current lost wages, which can be based on pay stubs and other evidence from before the injury. If a person earns $1,000 in a typical week and is out of work for 10 weeks, they’ve lost $10,000 in current wages.
To estimate a reasonable dollar figure representing total diminished earning capacity, The Mottley Law Firm may enlist the insight of vocational experts. Potential factors in this calculation may include:
- How the impairment affects a person’s ability to do the job they had before injury.
- How the TBI symptoms impact the person’s possible career trajectory.
- The possible loss of future opportunities and promotions.
- The likelihood they will be hired by another company for a similar job.
- Whether the person can reasonably pivot to a different career path.
- Whether they would be able to take on additional training and skills development.
- The estimated number of years left in their working life.
- Wages and other earnings from before the traumatic brain injury accident.
- Fair market value for the person’s skills and experience before their injury.
- Any reduction in hours or productivity resulting from the TBI.
- Whether the workplace can make reasonable accommodations.
The objective is to project how much the plaintiff loses over their lifetime as a result of suffering a brain injury. A younger person who had a bright future ahead of them may be eligible for a larger settlement than an older adult on the cusp of retirement.
