Kenneth E. Amos, Jr. and Caitlin E. Finneman (St. Petersburg, FL) (Automobile Liability) obtained a favorable verdict in a Hillsborough County brain injury trial. Our client rear-ended a pickup truck at a stoplight. The impact was substantial — it bent the truck’s steel tow hitch and damaged the bumper and frame. Liability was admitted from the outset. The Plaintiff, a woman in her sixties, was the front-seat passenger. Her orthopedic complaints resolved, and Plaintiff’s counsel conceded as much in opening statement. What remained was a claim for a permanent mild traumatic brain injury.
Her emergency room CT and subsequent brain MRI were both normal. The brain injury claim rested instead on a diffusion tensor imaging study (DTI) arranged after the fact, on computerized cognitive testing administered by her treating neurologist, and on his opinion that her symptoms were permanent, would continue to worsen, and would require management for the remainder of her life. We did not contest liability, did not dispute that the collision was significant, and never suggested the Plaintiff was exaggerating or feigning her symptoms. The defense was built almost entirely from the Plaintiff’s own records, her own providers’ testimony, and her own experts’ source material.
The treating neurologist had enrolled the Plaintiff in a computerized cognitive rehabilitation program and billed for twelve weeks of sessions. The program generated automatic progress reports, which were in the chart. Over three months, the Plaintiff completed 770 exercises and advanced through the program’s difficulty levels in every single domain measured — memory, attention, executive function and processing speed — several of them to the program’s maximum level. Six weeks later, the same physician administered a shortened version of a different test and concluded she had deteriorated. Significantly elevated blood pressure documented in the emergency department was never evaluated as a source of her headaches.
The defense asked the jury to answer two threshold questions: whether the evidence proved that this collision caused a need for future medical treatment for a TBI, and whether she suffered a permanent injury. We took the position that both questions were a no and asked the jury to award nothing on future medical treatment and the noneconomic damages lines. The jury deliberated for almost six hours and returned a verdict of $67,957.34 — awarding past medical expenses and nothing further. Plaintiff’s demand was $7.5 Million. Plaintiff recovered less than one percent of the amount sought, and nothing on the life care plan that exceeded $2.84 million.