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Supporting You In Dealing With Trauma Why Trauma-Informed Lawyering is Crucial
Eurydice Cote
If you are reading this it is likely that you, or a loved one has suffered a brain injury. This might be a traumatic brain injury (TBI), caused in a road traffic or workplace accident, or as a result of clinical negligence – for example failure to treat a stroke, or anaesthetic error.
You will already have discovered that there is a huge amount of information available online, and that “Dr Google” can give you a very good understanding of the causes and symptoms of brain injury. Sadly, the changes in your own health, or that of your loved one will have also taught you things about brain injury that you never knew, or wanted to know.
If, by any chance you have not started to research brain injury, and are still in the early days of finding out all about it, then I would suggest that you begin with the website for Headway, the brain injury association. That will give you a very thorough and compassionate introduction to the subject, and also give you links for how you can find further support and information in your local area, for example by attending a Headway group.
The first priority for a person with a traumatic brain injury is of course to find excellent medical care and rehabilitation. Sometimes, perhaps unfortunately, the second priority is to find a specialist brain injury solicitor to help bring a compensation claim.
If you start looking, you will find that there are, apparently, lots of solicitors firms who specialise in brain injury cases. I hesitate to sound sceptical about my own profession, but solicitors firms are businesses, and some websites will reflect the type of work that those firms would like to specialise in, rather than the work that they actually do.
A brain injury compensation claim can be an intense and long running process and, depending upon the severity of the injury might give rise to a claim that is worth many millions of pounds. Therefore, choosing the right solicitor is essential. If you get it right, you will have a successful claim, and it is very likely that your solicitor will become a very important part of your support network, a family friend, and a trusted legal advisor for life.
Get it wrong, and your claim might take longer than it otherwise should, you may find that your solicitor is “learning on the job” with no real understanding of the medical issues, and at worse you might lose the claim all together.
With that in mind, here are a few pointers for choosing the right solicitor:
If you have read to the end of this blog, then I hope you will have found it interesting. I also imagine you won’t be surprised that I am going to finish by saying that I have been dealing with serious brain injury cases for over 25 years. Therefore, if you or a loved one have a brain injury compensation claim, and you would like to discuss it with me, I would be very pleased to meet with you. My contact details are tdonovan@kingsleynapley.co.uk 0207 814 1260, and you can find out more about me here.
We welcome views and opinions about the issues raised in this blog. Should you require specific advice in relation to personal circumstances, please use the form on the contact page.
Eurydice Cote
Richard Fox
Marcia Longdon
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