Spinal Cord Injuries In Car Accidents

When a car accident causes a spinal cord injury (SCI), you don’t simply walk away and move on with your life. An injury to your cervical, thoracic, or lumbar spine can limit your mobility, disrupt your earning capacity, and impose crushing financial stress. It is your right to seek fair compensation for your injury (and other accident-related damages), and a lawyer from our team will help.

The Greenville car accident attorneys at Jordan Law Center understand how debilitating a spinal cord injury can be. We also know how costly such an injury can be. Allow us to pursue a fair financial recovery for you. Call or contact us online to complete your free, no-obligation consultation.

How Car Accidents Can Damage The Spine And Spinal Cord

The spinal cord is a delicate structure protected by vertebrae, discs, ligaments, and muscle. During a violent traffic accident, that protection may not prove sufficient to prevent injury.

Crash Forces That Commonly Cause Spinal Cord Injuries

A car accident spinal cord injury can occur in several ways, depending on the type of crash and the movement of your body during and after impact. Spinal cord injuries like yours might result from:

• Sudden forward and backward motion of the head and neck
• Compression of the spine
• Twisting of the torso
• Rapid deceleration that may cause spinal damage even without direct impact
• Intrusions into the passenger compartment from crushed doors, a collapsing roof, or objects penetrating the vehicle’s frame
• Ejection from the vehicle, which may expose the spine to direct impacts with the ground or other objects

Safety features such as airbags and seat belts are often insufficient to prevent spinal cord injuries.

How Spinal Cord Injuries from Car Accidents Affect Daily Life

Herniated discs, vertebral fractures, ligament damage, and nerve root compression. These are just some of the spinal cord injuries that affect car accident victims. These are also injuries that Insurance companies often try to minimize, even when the victim’s suffering is apparent.

Many South Carolinians do not understand just how critical (or how delicate) their spine is until it becomes the site of an injury. Then, the injured party abruptly learns how a spinal cord injury can cause:

Physical Symptoms (and the Practical Challenges Created by Those Symptoms)

Physical injuries (including to the spinal cord) tend to produce physical symptoms. For auto accident survivors with one or more spinal cord injuries, physical symptoms and related challenges can include:

• Reduced physical mobility
• Reliance on assistive devices
• Difficulty with fine motor tasks such as writing, typing, and buttoning clothes
• Chronic pain
• Nerve-related discomfort
• Sleep loss
• Muscle stiffness
• Involuntary spasms
• Reduced bladder and bowel control

Life can quickly become unmanageable when your spine is not healthy. These physical symptoms (and the loss of independence they might cause) can also contribute to a heavy psychological and emotional weight.

Emotional And Social Impact

Many car accident victims suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A survivor’s stress response can be exaggerated even further by the toll of a spinal cord injury.

Many people experience frustration, anxiety, depression, and even grief as they adjust to new limitations and mourn the loss (even if it’s just temporary) of the life they knew before the crash. Losing social activities, hobbies, exercise routines, and even the ability to run simple errands can be nothing short of devastating for someone with an SCI.

Damages In Spinal Cord Injury Car Accident Cases

At Jordan Law Center, we translate the effects of a spinal cord injury into damages. This is the legal term for harm caused by someone else’s negligence or intentional wrongdoing.

In car accident cases, we seek compensation that reflects the nature and severity of our client’s damages. These damages fall into two primary categories:

Economic Damages

Economic damages have an objective financial cost. In many spinal cord injury from car accident cases, economic damages include the monetary value of:

• All medical services related to the car accident and the resulting spinal cord injury
• Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and rehabilitation
• Prescription medications and other forms of pain management
• Medical equipment (such as walkers, wheelchairs, and braces)
• Home modifications
• Vehicle modifications
• In-home care or assisted living services
• Lost income
• Reduced earning capacity

Spinal cord injuries do not always heal. Long-term injuries tend to result in higher claims for economic damages.

Non-Economic Damages

Non-economic damages are those that we don’t typically evaluate in terms of money, with examples including:

• Physical pain
• Discomfort
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Emotional distress
• Loss of enjoyment of activities you once valued
• Loss of independence
• Impact on family relationships

Though we don’t typically associate physical pain or emotional distress with a dollar figure, our South Carolina car accident attorneys must assign a financial value to these kinds of damages. Financial compensation is, after all, how we help clients recover from their economic and non-economic damages.

How a South Carolina Car Accident Lawyer from Our Team Will Lead Your Spinal Cord Injury Case

Succeeding in a spinal cord injury claim requires thorough preparation, a strategic plan, compelling evidence, and performance under pressure. We at the Jordan Law Center know what it takes because we have helped many clients with spinal cord injuries secure fair compensation.

When you engage your South Carolina SCI attorney from our team, you can heal while they:

Investigate the Cause Of Your Accident

We will identify who caused your accident, as that is who caused your spinal cord injury. We may reach this determination by:

• Reviewing police reports
• Evaluating and securing witness statements
• Collecting photos, videos, and other accident-related evidence
• Analyzing vehicle damage
• Having automotive experts reconstruct the collision
• Examining phone records in distracted driving cases

We will determine who is at fault and obtain evidence to support our determination.

Deal with the Insurance Companies

We handle all communication with insurers so you can focus on healing. Insurers too often use bad-faith tactics to underpay accident victims with spinal cord injuries, and we will protect you from such tactics.

Build a Detailed Record of Your Damages

A strong spinal cord injury car accident claim requires detailed documentation of damages, which should prove:

• The nature and extent of the spinal cord injury
• All required treatment (and the cost of that treatment)
• The effect of the injury on your ability to work
• How the injury has interfered with your daily life (and sapped your quality of life)
• The full financial cost of living with the injury

The Jordan Law Center team prioritizes personal attention, so you will always know where your case stands and where it is headed.

While many cases resolve through settlement, we prepare each claim as if it may need to be presented in court. We can negotiate with full confidence because we are genuinely prepared to go to trial at any moment.

Call the Jordan Law Center Today for Your Free Consultation About Your Car Accident Spinal Cord Injuries

If you are dealing with a spinal cord injury after a car accident, you deserve legal guidance proven to work. The Jordan Law Center has recovered millions of dollars for our clients, and we consider every case we lead to be our most important.

Call the Jordan Law Center today or contact us online for your free consultation with a South Carolina car accident lawyer who will demand fair compensation for your spinal cord injury.