Los Angeles Spinal Cord Injury Lawyer

Los Angeles Spinal Cord Injury Lawyer

DK Law represents people with spinal cord injuries across Los Angeles.

What a spinal cord claim is worth can depend on three things: where on your spine the injury happened, how doctors graded it, and whether anyone besides your employer can be held responsible.

Quick Answers

• Cost to you: nothing up front. We work on contingency. No fee unless we recover money for you.
• Where the injury sits on your spine matters more than almost anything else. An injury in the neck generally costs far more over a lifetime than one in the lower back, and that difference shows up directly in the value of a claim.
• Hurt at work? You may have a second claim. Workers’ comp is usually your only option against your employer. It is not your only option against everyone else, and the second claim is often worth far more.
• A normal X-ray or CT scan does not mean you weren’t hurt. Some spinal cord injuries only appear on an MRI.
• Going back to your old job is the exception. About 65% of people were working when they were injured. About 18% are working a year later.
• Deadlines: two years in most cases. Six months if a city, county, or state agency is involved.
• Call 24/7. Free consultation, in English, Korean, or Spanish.

What Is a Spinal Cord Injury, and Why These Cases Are Harder?

A spinal cord injury happens when trauma to the spine disrupts how signals travel between the brain and the rest of the body. The American Spinal Injury Association grades these injuries from A (no feeling or movement below the injury) to E (normal strength and feeling), and the effects can range from partial weakness to complete loss of movement and sensation below the injury site.

These cases tend to be harder to win than an ordinary injury claim. Insurers often challenge the diagnosis, the severity, or both, and the true cost of a spinal cord injury rarely shows up in the first month of bills. That’s why the early offer an insurer makes is almost never what the case is actually worth.

Were You Hurt at Work? You May Still Have a Second Claim

This is the single most common thing injured workers get wrong, and it costs them.

Under Labor Code section 3600, workers’ comp pays regardless of who was at fault, and in exchange you normally cannot sue your employer. That’s where most people assume the story ends. But workers’ comp doesn’t cover pain and suffering, and it doesn’t cover your full lost earnings.

Labor Code section 3852 allows for a separate claim against anyone who isn’t your employer, filed at the same time as your workers’ comp claim. In practice, that can include:

• The driver who hit you, if you were injured on the road for work.
• The manufacturer of a machine, lift, ladder, or vehicle that failed.
• The property owner or general contractor who controlled an unsafe site.
• Your employer, in narrow circumstances, including where the employer knowingly removed a guard from a power press that the manufacturer required, under Labor Code section 4558.

A worker who assumes comp is the end of the story can leave the larger claim on the table entirely.

What DK Law Does for Your Case

• Gets the medical record right. The injury grade, spine level, and imaging are what the whole claim is built on. If those are wrong or incomplete in the chart, everything downstream is too.
• Looks past your employer. In workplace injuries, the real value is usually here: a negligent driver, a property owner, a general contractor, or the maker of a failed machine.
• Finds every insurance policy. Primary coverage, commercial coverage, excess layers, and your own uninsured motorist coverage if a driver was involved.
• Brings in the people who document lifetime cost. Certified planners and economists produce the evidence of what decades of care will actually cost. We explain how that works on our catastrophic injury page.
• Handles the insurance companies so the adjusters stop calling you.
• Files against public agencies on time, because the six-month deadline ends otherwise strong cases.

How Doctors Grade a Spinal Cord Injury, and What It Means for Your Case

Doctors use a scale published by the American Spinal Injury Association, a professional group of spine specialists. It runs from A to E.

• A means no feeling or movement below the injury.
• B means some feeling below the injury, but no movement.
• C means some movement, though most of the key muscles are too weak to lift against gravity.
• D means some movement, and at least half the key muscles can lift against gravity.
• E means strength and feeling test normal again.

Two more terms you will hear. A complete injury means no nerve signals get past the damaged spot. An incomplete injury means some still get through, which usually means a better chance of partial recovery. 

Tetraplegia (also called quadriplegia) affects all four limbs and comes from an injury in the neck. Paraplegia affects the legs and lower body, while sparing the arms.

The grade of injury matters legally because doctors use it to predict how much recovery to expect and how much future care will be needed. Insurers understand this too, so expect them to argue for a more optimistic grade than the one your own doctors assigned. Full neurological recovery by the time of hospital discharge occurs in under 1% of cases.

Why the Level of the Injury Changes What a Case Is Worth

The higher up the spine the damage is, the more of the body it affects.

• Neck (C1 through C8). Most function is lost, and costs are highest. Injuries at C1 or C2 usually require a ventilator to breathe. C3 and C4 often need breathing support at least part of the time.
• Chest and upper back (T1 through T12). Usually affects the legs and torso, with full arm use.
• Lower back (L1 through L5). Varying leg function. The lower the injury, the more is preserved.
• Base of the spine (S1 through S5). Bowel, bladder, and sexual function.

The National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center (NSCISC), based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, publishes average lifetime costs by injury level. 

For someone injured at 25, the averages run from roughly $2.1 million for the mildest category to about $6.4 million for the most severe neck injuries. Those are national averages for health care and living expenses only. They exclude lost earnings, which the same research puts near $98,000 a year on average.

Calculate your lost earnings and wages for free here!

Treat those numbers as context, not as a prediction about your case. What an individual claim is worth depends on the specific medical evidence and how much insurance is available. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

What if Your Scans Came Back Normal?

You can have a serious spinal cord injury that does not show up on an X-ray or a CT scan. Doctors call this SCIWORA, short for spinal cord injury without radiographic abnormality. An MRI usually finds what the other scans miss.

It is more common in children, but it happens to adults too. One review of adult spinal cord injuries treated at a major trauma center put the rate at between 10% and 12% of cases. Insurers lean hard on a clean X-ray as proof nothing happened, which is why getting the right imaging early matters both medically and to the claim.

How Long Do You Have to File?

• Against a person or company: two years from the date of injury, under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1.
• Against a city, county, or state agency: six months. A written claim has to be presented first, and missing that deadline generally ends the case against that agency.
• Workers’ comp has its own separate deadlines, which do not extend the ones above.

Helpful Resources

• Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey hosts the Southern California Spinal Cord Injury Model System, a federally funded research and rehabilitation program. It is one of two such programs in California, the other being in San Jose. We have no affiliation with it, and list it because it is a genuine resource.
• Our California catastrophic injury guide explains how these claims generally work.
• If the injury also involved a head injury, our Los Angeles brain injury team handles those cases.

Talk to DK Law

The questions worth answering early are what your medical records actually say, who besides your employer might be responsible, and how much insurance exists to reach. Those answers come from the facts of your case.

DK Law handles these claims as part of our catastrophic injury practice throughout Los Angeles and California. This page is general information, not medical advice. There is no fee unless we win. Call DK Law today for a free consultation.