Las Vegas Spinal
Cord Injury Attorneys
Las Vegas is known for its casinos, shows, and other tourist attractions. Unfortunately, however, with this opportunity for fun also comes the opportunity for injury. One of the most serious injuries that someone can suffer is a spinal cord injury. If you’ve sustained such an injury, you may face overwhelming medical bills and other expenses. Fortunately, if you sustained a spinal cord injury in Las Vegas, you likely have legal recourse. Contact an experienced Las Vegas Spinal Cord Attorney today to determine your eligibility to seek compensation.
Call Us if You Sustained a Spinal Cord Injury in Las Vegas?
Spinal cord injuries occur for lots of different reasons. In Las Vegas, our lively surroundings may increase someone’s risk of spinal cord injury. If you’ve experienced a spinal cord injury in Las Vegas, contact a qualified legal professional at Benson & Bingham Accident Injury Lawyers, LLC, who has your best interests at heart.
That’s where our team comes in. At Benson & Bingham Accident Injury Lawyers, LLC, we rely on our extensive legal experience to help us fight for our clients’ rights. We can help you pursue damages to help account for medical bills, pain and suffering, lost wages, and more. Reach out to us today to find out more about our services and to speak to a qualified attorney about your case.
Negligence Causes Spinal Cord Injuries
Negligence can and does lead to millions of injuries every year. Spinal cord injuries are just one example. As many as half a million Spinal cord injuries take place around the globe every year.
The good news is that Nevada law allows people to pursue justice when someone else’s negligence or recklessness causes harm or loss. If you wish to prove another party’s negligence and obtain compensation for your losses, the law requires that you prove all of the following:
- The defendant owed you a duty of care to act reasonably and avoid engaging in activities likely to result in injury.
- The defendant breached this duty by acting unreasonably.
- The defendant’s breach caused your accident.
- You suffered an injury and damages due to the accident.
What Can You Recover After a Las Vegas Spinal Cord Injury?
Many of our clients initially approach us with questions about what justice looks like following a spinal cord injury. Most people consider collecting financial damages to be a key element of pursuing justice after their accidents.
After a spinal cord injury, you may recover damages to account for:
- Medical expenses: Including past, present, and future medical expenses associated with the injury and/or accident
- Pain and suffering: When an injury causes physical pain
- Mental anguish: When injuries cause mental distress and unhappiness
- Lost wages: For time and wages missed due to the spinal cord injury
- Diminished earning capacity: If the spinal cord injury permanently altered your ability to earn money
What Are the Signs of a Spinal Cord Injury?
Spinal cord injuries can cause many different symptoms. Because every spinal cord injury is unique, it’s impossible to predict how someone might be specifically impacted. Symptoms may range from relatively mild to very severe.
There are some signs of spinal cord injury that can help medical professionals make proper diagnoses. Many people who injure their spinal cords lose normal bowel and bladder control; even more people lose sensation in their limbs and extremities.
A handful of other signs of spinal cord injury include:
- Paralysis or low muscle strength
- Fractured or dislocated vertebrae
- Muscle contractions or spasms
- Difficulty breathing or clearing the lungs
- Altered sensations
- Numbness or tingling in hands/fingers or feet/toes
- Exaggerated reflexes
- Pain in the back, neck, or head
Incomplete vs. Complete Spinal Cord Injuries
Most of the time, spinal cord injuries are categorized as either complete or incomplete:
- Complete spinal cord injuries cause injured individuals to lose all of their motor and sensory functions beneath the injury site.
- Incomplete spinal cord injuries cause some sensory and/or motor function damage below the injury, but leave some function intact.
If a spinal cord injury causes paralysis from the neck down, doctors call it quadriplegia. The term for spinal cord injuries that cause paralysis from the waist down is paraplegia.
When the Potential Consequences of Spinal Cord Injuries Are Ignored
Most people have a lot on their plates. It’s not uncommon for the symptoms of a spinal cord injury to go unnoticed, and it happens for plenty of reasons. Whether you’re too busy to get to the doctor, or you’re afraid of looking down the barrel of a stack of medical bills, a compassionate lawyer will understand your trepidation to seek medical attention for your spinal cord injury.
With that said, you should not ignore any signs of a spinal cord injury. If you’ve had a spinal cord injury diagnosed by a doctor, you should follow all of the doctor’s medical recommendations. It’s important to avoid suffering from complications. Seek medical attention and follow medical advice as soon as possible if you’ve suffered a spinal cord injury.
Elements of a Las Vegas Spinal Cord Injury Case
If you work with a lawyer to bring a spinal cord injury case, that case will involve several components.
You will work with your attorney to address three key factors:
- Cause: What was the cause of your spinal cord injury? Identify the circumstances that lead to your injury; physical evidence and witness testimonies can help you prove this in court.
- Liability: Who is legally responsible for your spinal cord injury? Generally, the person or entity liable for your injury is very closely related to the cause of the injury.
- Compensation: What compensation do you want or need to pursue? What is your case worth? You can work with a lawyer to determine the expenses and losses you should seek after your injury.
Spinal Cord Injury Statistics
Accidents that cause damage to the spine can have a lifelong impact on an injured individual’s life. Not only are spinal cord injuries dangerous, but they also may stem from some common types of accidents. Many spinal cord injuries can be traced back to car accidents, falls, work injuries, and other traumatic incidents.
Consider these statistics:
- More than 26 percent of spinal cord injuries occur due to falls.
- Another 15 percent of spinal cord injuries can be traced back to assaults or violence.
Almost 8 percent of reported spinal cord injuries occur during sports (especially contact sports).
Las Vegas Spinal Cord Injury FAQs
Spinal cord injuries are expensive, even when you have insurance. Most families cannot cover the costs once their insurance coverage runs out. When another person causes you to suffer a spinal cord injury, you may be eligible to collect compensation from that person and/or their insurance company for medical expenses and other damages, including long-term therapy sessions.
If you suffered spinal cord injuries in an accident in Nevada, contact Las Vegas attorneys Benson & Bingham Accident Injury Lawyers, LLC today for a free case evaluation.
What causes of spinal cord injuries can you help me seek compensation for?
Several types of accidents can cause spinal cord injuries, including vehicle accidents, medical malpractice, slip or trip and fall accidents, violent acts, and sport-related injuries.
Why does a spinal cord injury cause paralysis?
The spine is the column of bones that protects the spinal cord. It starts at your head and goes to your lower back. Muscles and ligaments connect the vertebrae. Discs are soft and ride between the vertebrae. You have seven cervical vertebrae, 12 thoracic vertebrae, five sacral vertebrae, and three to five coccygeal vertebrae. The spinal cord, a bundle of nerves, runs from the base of your brain through the spine and carries signals to and from other parts of your body to the brain.
When your brain cannot send a signal to another part of your body, you are paralyzed. If you injure the cervical part of the spinal cord—the upper part of it—you find yourself paralyzed from the neck down. This results in quadriplegia. If you suffer an injury between the waist to just below the cervical vertebrae, you could become a paraplegic—your torso and legs may become paralyzed.
The injury to the spinal cord does not allow the signals to your brain to travel to the part of the body that can no longer move. If you injure the cervical part of the spine and you think you want to grab a soda can, your arm and hand never receive the signal and don’t move.
How long does a spinal cord injury take to show signs or symptoms?
In most cases, the signs and symptoms of a spinal cord injury are instantly apparent. Depending on the injury’s severity, some indicators may not be noticeable until days or weeks following the injury.
The period immediately following the spinal cord injury is the most critical in terms of medical treatment. Anyone suspected of having a spinal cord injury should be evaluated by a medical professional as soon as possible.
What are the signs of spinal cord injuries?
Not all spinal cord injuries cause paralysis.
Other symptoms of a spinal cord injury can include:
- Back pain.
- A feeling of pressure on the back, spine, head, or neck.
- Tingling in the feet and/or hands.
- No sensation in part of the body.
- Difficulty balancing while standing.
- Difficulty walking.
- Loss of bowel and/or bladder control.
- Muscle spasms.
- A hard time breathing.
- A stinging sensation in the spinal cord.
- Difficulty clearing secretions from the lungs or throat.
- Sexual dysfunction.
- A feeling of heat or cold on the skin without cause.
- Circulatory issues.
Do doctors have a cure for spinal cord injuries?
Doctors have not found a cure for spinal cord injuries. However, depending on the severity of the damage, physical therapy can sometimes lead to partial or nearly complete recovery from a spinal cord injury. Spinal cord injury victims must closely follow the treatments prescribed by their physicians, especially immediately after the accident. This will help tremendously with your legal claim, since the at-fault party cannot claim that you sabotaged your recovery by not complying with your doctor’s orders.
The likely permanence of a spinal cord injury makes it an extremely expensive financial burden. If someone else caused it, they should pay for your treatment, wheelchair, home renovations, and anything else you need to regain maximum independence.
How much is my spinal cord injury case worth?
The compensation you might recover after an accident that causes a spinal cord injury depends on the severity of the injury and whether you can prove that someone else caused the accident. Accident victims can recover compensatory damages and, in some cases, punitive damages after an accident. Punitive damages are only available if the at-fault party acted particularly egregiously in causing the accident.
Compensatory damages include economic damages, which reimburse the victim for expenses related to the accident, and non-economic damages, which reimburse the victim for intangible losses, such as pain and suffering. While money cannot fix the injuries, of course, it can relieve a big financial burden for the injured.
What are economic damages?
Economic damages, also sometimes known as special damages, can include:
- Past medical expenses incurred up until the settlement or trial award.
- Future medical expenses that the victim will likely incur in the future for accident-related care.
- Wages lost because of accident-related injuries.
- Future lost wages if the victim cannot return to work. If the victim can return to work, but their injuries preclude them from making the same salary as they did before the accident, they might collect partial future lost wages.
- Replacement or repair of destroyed or damaged personal property.
What are non-economic damages?
Non-economic damages, also known as general damages, do not have an easily assigned monetary value, so are more challenging to estimate than economic damages. Attorneys and insurance companies have formulas they use to estimate the money value of these losses.
These damages can include:
- Pain and suffering, including emotional distress.
- Loss of quality of life, including loss of companionship and loss of consortium.
- Loss of use of a body part or bodily function.
- Disfigurement and scarring.
- Paralysis.
- Amputation.
Our Las Vegas Spinal Cord Injury Lawyers Are Prepared to Help You
Have you been the victim of a Las Vegas spinal cord injury? We’re here to help. Contact Benson & Bingham Accident Injury Lawyers, LLC, or dial (702) 382-9797 today to speak to a qualified Las Vegas personal injury lawyer about your circumstances. We are here to help!
Client Testimonial
“Choosing Benson & Bingham lawyer services was the best decision I made following my accident. I went to their office located downtown and the day I walked in the door I knew I would be in good hands. From the young lady at the front desk to my lawyer and her assistant, everyone was very kind, and compassionate. They treated me with respect and my lawyer had a lot of patience, which I’m grateful for. They kept me up to date every step of the way and explained,in detail, answers to any questions I had. I would recommend Benson & Benson to anyone in need of help!”
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