A traumatic brain injury can be devastating even when nothing shows up on a routine scan — which is exactly what makes these cases so difficult. In this video, Keith E. Galliher, Jr., founder and principal attorney of The Galliher Law Firm in Las Vegas, explains why brain injury litigation demands specialized knowledge.
Galliher explains that brain injuries range widely in severity, that many have subtle symptoms, and that a normal CAT scan or MRI does not rule one out. He describes advanced tools like diffusion tensor imaging and emerging treatments that many attorneys still don’t know exist. The takeaway is clear: when clients come to The Galliher Law Firm, they work with a team that understands what a brain injury is, how it should be diagnosed, and — most importantly — how it can be treated.
Transcript
These are unique cases, and the problem with traumatic brain injury cases, from a litigation standpoint, is that it’s not a visible injury most of the time. There are a lot of different degrees of traumatic brain injuries. When most people think of a traumatic brain injury, they think of someone who’s lost their ability to talk, can’t reason — they’re basically vegetables, they’re alive but not really. No — a lot of traumatic brain injuries have much more subtle symptoms.
Not only that, but from a diagnosis standpoint, they’re difficult to detect. If you do a CAT scan or an MRI of the brain, you may not see anything at all that looks abnormal, but the person still sustained a brain injury, because it may be microscopic. There are all kinds of different areas of the brain that are affected, and most testing doesn’t disclose that type of injury. Now, in this day and age, things have changed. We have something called diffusion tensor imaging. Not many attorneys know about it, but it is the state-of-the-art diagnostic tool when it comes to brain injury cases. It’s handled by only a few very credentialed physicians throughout the country, and the DTI testing will tell the neurosurgeon or neuroradiologist that performs it exactly what’s wrong with the brain — where the areas of infarct are. We talk about infarcts as visible evidence of brain injury, and those diagnoses then allow the doctor to become a treater.
There’s something called electromagnetic stimulation, which is now used to help people with these types of injuries — largely unknown 10 years ago, and still a lot of attorneys don’t know it exists. A lot of attorneys handle brain injury cases, but they really don’t know what they’re handling. The bottom line is, when you come to The Galliher Law Firm, we know what a brain injury is, we know how it should be diagnosed, and, most importantly, we know how it can be treated to make you better — which, of course, should be the focus of any personal injury case.
