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Insurance company representatives often seize upon the term “minor brain injury” to devalue what is too often a life-altering event. They are eager to ignore post-concussion syndrome until vigorous representation forces them to deal with it.

Brain injury . concussion

While many people do seem to fully recover from an isolated occasion of “getting their bell rung” with a concussion in sports or accidents, many others never fully recover. The combination of “minor” with “brain injury” is thus often an oxymoron (a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction). No brain injury that has a continuing effect on- you or a loved…

For decades I have  represented people with so-called “mild” traumatic brain injuries. A “mild” traumatic brain injury  (TBI) may be defined as one affecting someone else’s family, not your own.

These typically involve a concussion, with or without a loss of consciousness. Emergency medical personnel and emergency department physicians often focus primarily on more obvious physical injuries. If there are visible and immediately life threatening injuries, broken bones or internal bleeding, that is the focus.

Subtle but life altering brain injuries are easily overlooked. Unless there is a gross brain bleed readily visible on a CT scan of the brain,…

In the past week I’ve run across an unexpected convergence between my roles as a trial lawyer handling brain injury cases and as president-elect of the State Bar of Georgia.

Last Friday, I attended a program on criminal justice reform at the American Bar Association office in Washington, along with state government representatives. Among the dizzying array of statistics cited in the program was data on the huge percentage of state prisoners who have alcohol and drug addictions and/or mental illness.

The program presenters did not drill down in the data to focus on the prevalence of traumatic brain injury among convicts.  However, in a study on "Traumatic Brain Injury Among Prisoners," the authors summarize a body of research finding that from 76% to 88% of prisoners have a history of traumatic brain injury, and that from 36% to 58% have had traumatic brain injury with loss of consciousness.

The article also reports that Individuals with a history of TBI are much more likely to have problems with alcohol and drug abuse than people without TBI, as well as irritability or aggressiveness, including explosive outbursts, which can be set off by minimal provocation.

In efforts to divert a portion of prison populations to less expensive, community based correction and rehabilitation options, the prevalence of TBI is an important factor to recognize. If individuals are too dangerous to set free, they must still be locked up notwithstanding TBI history. However, there are probably many who could with some treatment do well in a less restrictive (and less expensive) form of correctional supervision. For sake of public safety, an individualized risk assessment should be used.

Parents of kids who have traumatic brain injuries should be aware that it is important to recognize the risk factors affecting the child’s long-term quality of life, and build in to a life care plan funds for psychological and tutoring services to prevent them from falling into behaviors that may lead to prison.

For example, in one recent case involving a preschool child who suffered a head injury when a large truck overturned on the family vehicle, we built into the settlement funds to flexibly provide psychological, tutoring and other services that would address learning disabilities and behavioral problems that could get him on the wrong path in life.