Catastrophic Injuries

What Makes an Injury Catastrophic

An injury is generally considered catastrophic when it causes permanent or long-lasting harm that significantly limits your ability to work, care for yourself, or live as you did before. The injuries we see most often include:

• Traumatic brain injury (TBI). Even a "mild" brain injury can cause lasting problems with memory, concentration, mood, and sleep. Because many symptoms do not show up on a scan, insurers routinely dispute them.
• Spinal cord injury and paralysis. Damage to the spinal cord can cause partial or complete loss of movement and sensation, with lifelong medical and daily-living needs.
• Amputation. Losing a limb means surgeries, prosthetics that must be replaced over time, therapy, and often a change of career.
• Severe burns. Deep burns can require skin grafts, repeated reconstructive surgery, and long-term care for scarring and lost range of motion.

Other catastrophic injuries include crush injuries, serious organ damage, vision and hearing loss, and complex fractures that never fully heal. They can result from car and truck crashes, motorcycle wrecks, falls, construction-site accidents, fires, and explosions.

Building a Claim Around the Rest of Your Life

The biggest risk in a catastrophic injury case is settling for today's bills while tomorrow's costs go uncounted. We build the claim forward:

• Life-care planning. A life-care plan maps the medical care, equipment, therapy, medication, home modifications, and attendant care you are likely to need over your lifetime, and what each will cost.
• Future medical costs. We work with your treating physicians to document future surgeries, prosthetic replacements, rehabilitation, and the complications that often follow serious injuries.
• Lost earning capacity. This is different from lost wages. It measures the income you can no longer earn over your working life, and vocational professionals and economists can help calculate it.
• The human losses. Pain, mental anguish, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment of life are real damages under Florida law, and they deserve the same careful documentation as the medical bills.

We have the resources to bring in the professionals these cases require, including economists, engineers, accident reconstructionists, vocational rehabilitation professionals, and medical and nursing consultants. You pay nothing up front for that work. We advance case costs, and you owe no fee unless we recover money for you.

Results in Catastrophic Injury Cases

• $1.1 Million: Motorcycle Accident in Citrus County, FL. Our client was injured while riding his motorcycle, resulting in a below-the-knee amputation.
• $1 Million: Fall From Roof While on the Job in Tampa, FL. A crane operator's negligence knocked our client from a roof at a residential construction site onto a concrete floor, causing a traumatic brain injury and multiple orthopedic injuries that required multiple surgeries.
• $950,000: Burn Injury in Tampa, FL. An exploding grill at our client's workplace caused burns to the face, neck, and arms, leaving permanent scarring and lost range of motion.

Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case depends on its own facts. See more of our case results.

When the Injury Happens at Work

Workers' compensation usually covers on-the-job injuries, but it does not pay for pain and suffering and often falls far short in a catastrophic case. When someone other than your employer caused the harm, such as another contractor, an equipment operator, or the maker of a defective product, you may also have a separate injury claim against that party. We look for every one of those claims.

Protecting Your Claim While You Recover

Catastrophic claims draw the most aggressive defense, because the potential payout is large. Adjusters may ask for recorded statements, request broad medical authorizations, or push an early offer before anyone understands your long-term prognosis. You have no obligation to give the at-fault party's insurer a statement, and you should not settle before your doctors can describe your future needs. Mike Hancock defended insurance companies before founding this firm in 1996, and he knows how insurers try to discount serious injury claims.

A few Florida rules also shape these cases. Your recovery is reduced by any share of fault assigned to you, and if you are found more than 50% at fault you generally cannot recover (section 768.81). For most injuries on or after March 24, 2023, the general deadline to file a lawsuit is two years, with exceptions that can make it shorter. If an injury leads to a death, the family's claim falls under Florida's Wrongful Death Act; our wrongful death page explains how those claims work.

Talk to a Tampa Catastrophic Injury Lawyer

You and your family should be focused on treatment and recovery, not on insurance forms. We take care of the investigation, the insurers, and the long work of proving what your future will require.

Call (813) 915-1110, 24/7, or contact us online. We can meet by phone, by video, or at your home, at no cost and with no obligation.