When catastrophic injury is followed by death within seconds or minutes, the estate’s claim for conscious pain and suffering cannot rest on the severity of the trauma or on the fact that biological life continued for some measurable interval. The law compensates conscious experience, not survival time. The evidentiary task is to reconstruct whether meaningful […]
The question is not simply whether someone was exposed to a hazardous substance. It is whether that exposure created a present, medically supportable need for surveillance different from ordinary care, and whether the governing jurisdiction recognizes that need as legally compensable before disease has manifested. Exposure, increased risk, and monitoring necessity are three separate propositions […]
Yes, a defendant can benefit from an incomplete accident reconstruction, but the mechanism matters. The benefit does not come from a rule that evidentiary gaps favor defendants, and it does not come from a defendant manufacturing uncertainty or profiting from evidence it had a duty to preserve. It comes from the ordinary structure of civil […]
A delayed transfer to a higher-level trauma center does not become a viable litigation theory by the mere passage of time. The case must do considerably more: it must identify when the patient’s needs exceeded the sending facility’s capabilities, establish which portion of the resulting interval was avoidable, trace what happened physiologically during that interval, […]
“Survival” is not one legal concept in catastrophic injury litigation, and treating it as one is where many cases go wrong. A case may turn on whether the defendant’s conduct caused death, whether it materially reduced a chance of surviving or recovering, how long a living plaintiff can responsibly be projected to survive, or whether […]