Austin Traumatic Brain Injury Lawyer

The scan came back normal and you are still not yourself

You walked away. Somebody asked if you were okay and you said yes, because at the time you thought you were. Maybe the ambulance came and you declined transport. Maybe you went to the emergency department at Dell Seton and sat for four hours and left with a CT that read normal and a discharge sheet that said to follow up with your regular doctor. The paperwork says "no LOC." Nobody used the word concussion.

Then the weeks went by. You lost your keys twice in a day. You started a sentence and could not find the end of it. Sound got louder than it used to be. You slept eleven hours and woke up tired. Your supervisor asked why the report was late, and you did not have a good answer, because you had started it three times. Somebody at home said you have been short with them. You have been telling yourself it is stress.

If you are the spouse, the parent, or the adult child reading this — you are the one who noticed first. You are also the one being told it is stress, that they are tired, that they will bounce back. Trust what you are seeing. The person you live with has changed in a way that is obvious to you and invisible on a chart.

Here is what the fight is actually about in a Texas brain injury case. The insurance company will agree there was a wreck. It may even agree somebody was at fault. What it will contest, in every one of these cases, is whether the brain was injured at all — and it will point at the normal CT scan to do it. Everything on this page exists to answer that. How you prove an injury that did not show up on the scan the hospital ran.

We are Medina & Medina Personal Injury Attorneys, an Austin firm. The consultation is free, it happens in English or Spanish, and you do not have to come to our office to have it.

What the public data actually says about head injuries

Every figure in this section was pulled from a government source on September 5, 2026, and each one is reproducible from the query or the document named beside it. We have said which year each number describes, because head-injury surveillance data lags and an old year presented as current is a lie told with a real number.

The national picture, and the enormous gap in it

The CDC's TBI data page reports approximately 214,110 TBI-related hospitalizations in 2020 and 68,663 TBI-related deaths in 2023 — the agency's own rendering of that is "more than 586 TBI-related hospitalizations and 190 TBI-related deaths per day."

Read CDC's caveat next to it, because it is the whole point: "These estimates do not include the many TBIs that are only treated in the emergency department, primary care, urgent care, or those that go untreated." The counted population is people sick enough to be admitted or to die. If you were discharged from an ER the same night, or never went at all, you are outside the number entirely. The category of injury this page is about is the category the surveillance system is worst at seeing.

CDC also reports that people age 75 and older accounted for about 32% of TBI-related hospitalizations and about 28% of TBI-related deaths, and that males had an age-adjusted hospitalization rate of 79.9 versus 43.7 for females and a death rate of 28.3 versus 8.4. On mechanism, CDC's facts page states that "falls lead to nearly half of the TBI-related hospitalizations."

What Texas itself publishes

Texas DSHS runs the Emergency Medical Services and Trauma Registries (EMSTR), which includes a Traumatic Brain Injury / Spinal Cord Injury registry. Its published TBI presentation, delivered June 18, 2024, reports data years 2020 and 2021:

Source: Texas DSHS, EMSTR, "Traumatic Brain Injury Data," June 18, 2024. Ten leading mechanisms only, as published.

By age, the registry recorded 3,810 TBI records for adults 65 and older in 2020 and 4,423 in 2021 — larger than any other age band in either year. Under 18 was 1,572 and 1,628; ages 18–24 were 615 and 638; ages 25–44 were 1,405 and 1,503; ages 45–64 were 1,714 and 1,902. By sex, the split was 61% male in 2020 and 62% male in 2021.

The scope note matters more than the totals. DSHS describes EMSTR as a "passive surveillance system," and hospitals report TBI records meeting National Trauma Data Bank inclusion criteria, which the same presentation describes as covering records "where a patient arrived deceased or was admitted for at least 48 hours." That is a slice of the severe end. A person who was evaluated and sent home is not in that table. Do not read the fall row as the number of Texans who hit their head falling — read it as the number who hit their head hard enough to be admitted for two days or to die.

Austin crashes, and the number this page will not give you

We pulled the City of Austin's Crash Report Data — Crash Level Records (Socrata dataset `y2wy-tgr5`) on September 5, 2026, filtered to `is_deleted = false` and calendar year 2025 on the Central-time crash timestamp. For 2025 inside the Austin full-purpose city boundary:

• 12,004 crashes.
• 99 deaths and 7,993 people injured.
• 307 suspected serious injuries, spread across 285 separate crashes.
• Of those serious injuries: 177 to vehicle occupants, 54 to pedestrians, 45 to motorcyclists, 22 to cyclists. Pedestrian deaths, 30. Cyclist deaths, 5.

And now the caveat, which we are not burying at the bottom. That dataset records the injury severity a peace officer coded at the scene. It records nothing about diagnosis. There is no field for "brain injury," and there is no honest arithmetic that turns 307 suspected serious injuries into a count of Austin head injuries. Anyone showing you a local brain-injury statistic drawn from crash records is doing something the data does not support. Where you see a number on this page, it is Austin crash severity, or it is Texas registry data, or it is national CDC data, and we have said which.

Sources

• CDC, TBI Data — https://www.cdc.gov/traumatic-brain-injury/data-research/index.html
• CDC, Facts About TBI — https://www.cdc.gov/traumatic-brain-injury/data-research/facts-stats/index.html
• Texas DSHS, EMSTR TBI presentation, June 18, 2024 — https://www.dshs.texas.gov/sites/default/files/injury/EMST-Registries/Webinars/DSHS-EMSTR-TBIAC-Presentation-June2024.pdf
• City of Austin Crash Report Data, Crash Level Records — https://data.austintexas.gov/Transportation-and-Mobility/Austin-Crash-Report-Data-Crash-Level-Records/y2wy-tgr5

Mild, moderate, severe: what the labels mean and what they do not

"Mild traumatic brain injury" is the phrase that costs people their cases, because everyone outside medicine hears it as "minor," and an adjuster is happy to let you keep hearing it that way.

The severity label describes the acute event. It is assigned from what could be measured in the first hours: how long you were unconscious, how long your mental state was altered, how much of the event you cannot remember, and your Glasgow Coma Scale score. The DoD/VA common definition of TBI, published on CDC's site, sets out the stratification:

Source: DoD/VA Common Definition of TBI, published at cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/Sep08TBI.pdf

Two things in that table do work for you.

"Normal structural imaging" is written into the definition of mild TBI. It is a criterion of the category, and its presence in your chart is consistent with the diagnosis rather than a refutation of it. The same document says the trauma "may produce more subtle damage that manifests by altered brain function, without structural damage that can be detected by traditional imaging studies such as MRI or CT scanning."

The GCS is a snapshot of one moment, and it is not a prognosis. The stratification document is explicit that "acute injury severity is determined at the time of the injury, but this severity level, while having some prognostic value, does not necessarily reflect the patient's ultimate level of functioning." It is also explicit that for stratification purposes the GCS is measured "at or after 24 hours" — which means the 15 an EMT wrote down at the roadside was never the number the definition contemplated.

Why a 15 is the most common number in these charts

A Glasgow Coma Scale of 15 means eyes open on their own, the person is oriented, and they follow commands. Nearly everyone who walks away from a wreck scores 15, including a substantial share of people who go on to have months of cognitive symptoms. The number rules out a comatose patient. That is the entire scope of what it does. When the defense expert leans on "GCS 15 at the scene" in a deposition, the answer is that a 15 was expected, that the scale was built to triage severe injury, and that the classification system's own author measures it a day later.

Why "no loss of consciousness" in the ER record is not the end of the argument

The single most common defense exhibit in an Austin head-injury case is a triage note with a checkbox: LOC — no. Three things about that box.

First, the definition does not require a knockout. The DoD/VA common definition is met by "new onset or worsening of at least one" of a list of findings immediately following the event, and the list includes "any alteration in mental state at the time of the injury (confusion, disorientation, slowed thinking, etc.)" and "any loss of memory for events immediately before or after the injury" alongside loss of consciousness. Feeling stunned, going blank for a few seconds, or losing the thirty seconds before impact each satisfy the definition on its own terms.

Second, the box records what you told a stranger while concussed. A person with an altered mental state is being asked to accurately self-report whether their mental state was altered. That is a genuinely poor instrument, and the note usually reflects what the patient said rather than what a clinician observed. The people whose observations count — the passenger, the officer, the bystander, the paramedic — are rarely the ones the box is quoting.

Third, CDC says the imaging is not the test. In CDC's own words: "A scan of your brain (such as a CT scan) is not needed to spot a mild TBI or concussion, but may sometimes be used for patients at risk for bleeding on the brain after a head or brain injury." A head CT in an emergency department is looking for a bleed, a skull fracture, and a mass effect — findings that would send you to surgery that night. It is not a concussion test, and it was never run as one.

The delayed-symptom timeline, and why the gap in treatment gets used against you

The DoD/VA document states plainly that "most signs and symptoms will manifest immediately following the event," and then: "However, other signs and symptoms may be delayed from days to months." That delay is ordinary in these injuries and ruinous in these files, because the way it shows up in the record is a three-week gap between the ER visit and the first follow-up. The defense calls that gap a credibility problem.

The practical answer is documentation that starts before the symptoms are fully formed. A dated note on your phone every day — what you forgot, what you had to re-read, how long the headache lasted, what sound or light you avoided — is worth more later than a perfect memory reconstructed a year out. If you sat out shifts, keep the schedule. If you dropped a class, keep the withdrawal. If your partner started driving because you stopped, that is a fact with a start date, and the start date is the evidence.

Neuropsychological testing, step by step

This is the objective evidence in a case where the scan is clean. A neuropsychological evaluation is performed by a licensed psychologist with specialty training, it usually takes most of a day, and it produces numbers.

The clinical interview and history. Injury mechanism, symptom course, medical history, education, work history, substance use, prior head injuries, prior psychiatric treatment. The examiner takes this history because the whole exercise depends on establishing a baseline; it is also, in litigation, where the defense will later hunt for something to blame.

The battery. A set of standardized instruments covering distinct cognitive domains — processing speed, attention, working memory, verbal and visual learning and memory, language, visuospatial function, and executive function (planning, set-shifting, inhibition). Each is normed against a population matched on age and often on education, and your performance is reported as a standard score or a percentile rather than a pass or a fail.

Effort and symptom validity measures, embedded throughout. These are the tests designed to detect whether someone is under-performing on purpose. They are not an insult and a competent examiner runs them on every examinee, plaintiff and defense alike. Their presence in your report is an asset, because a report without them is the first thing a defense expert attacks.

Emotional and personality measures. Depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress inventories, because mood disorders affect cognitive scores and because a brain injury frequently produces mood symptoms of its own. Untangling the two is part of the opinion, and skipping it invites the defense to attribute everything to depression.

The pattern, and the baseline estimate. The finding that means something is not one low score. It is a pattern of deficits in the domains you would predict from the mechanism, sitting well below an estimate of your pre-injury ability derived from education, occupational history, academic records, and hold measures like word reading that resist injury. A machinist with a two-year technical certificate and eleven years at the same shop who now scores at the 9th percentile on processing speed is a finding. The same score in isolation, with no baseline, is a number the defense can explain away.

What we go get before the testing happens

The estimate of your pre-injury baseline is only as strong as the documents behind it. Early in a case we collect school and college transcripts, standardized test results if they exist, performance reviews, disciplinary and attendance records, military records including any ASVAB score, and any prior neuropsychological or psychological testing. If your employer runs productivity metrics, we want the twelve months before and the months since. This material is what converts "he seems different" into a comparison the examiner can defend on cross-examination.

How the other side attacks a brain injury claim

Expect all six of these. They arrive in roughly this order.

1. The normal scan. Held up as though a clean CT settles the question. Answered by CDC's statement that imaging is not needed to identify a concussion, and by the classification system that lists normal structural imaging as a feature of the mild category.

2. Effort and symptom validity. The defense neuropsychologist reviews your testing looking for a failed validity indicator, and one failure will be characterized as invalidating everything. This is why the treating examiner's choice of instruments, and the completeness of the report, matter so much. It is also why a client should be told before testing: perform normally, do not exaggerate, and do not try to look better than you are either, because inconsistent effort in either direction shows up.

3. Pre-existing conditions. Prior concussion. ADHD. A learning difference. Depression. A migraine history. A previous crash. Sleep apnea. Each is offered as an alternative explanation for every symptom you have. Note what CDC's pediatric guidance actually lists as predictors of a prolonged recovery — history of prior head injury, premorbid neurological or psychiatric conditions, learning difficulties. In the clinical literature those are risk factors for a worse outcome. In a deposition they get recast as causes of the outcome, and the aggravation instruction discussed further down this page is the legal answer.

4. Secondary gain and malingering. The suggestion that symptoms appeared because a lawsuit did. Countered with a timeline: the date symptoms were first reported, to whom, before any representation began, and corroboration from people with nothing to gain.

5. The gap in treatment. Answered with the medical reality of delayed onset and with the practical reasons people do not go back — no insurance, no ride, no childcare, no time off, and, often, a brain injury impairing exactly the executive function required to schedule and keep appointments.

6. Surveillance and social media. Video of you carrying groceries or laughing at a birthday party, offered as though a cognitive injury should be visible from a parked car. Assume anything public is being collected.

The defense medical examination

At some point the defense will designate its own examiner and ask the court to order you to attend. Be ready for that day. Answer truthfully, describe a normal day rather than your worst day or your best one, do not perform, and do not minimize. If you are asked about a prior injury, say yes — a concealed prior concussion that surfaces later does more damage to a case than the concussion itself ever did.

Advanced imaging and what Texas courts will let a jury see

Diffusion tensor imaging, susceptibility-weighted imaging, functional MRI, PET and quantitative EEG all get proposed in brain injury litigation. The DoD/VA definition acknowledges the category directly: beyond traditional imaging, "other imaging techniques such as fMRI, diffusion tensor imaging, PET scanning, as well as electrophysiological testing such as electroencephalography may be used to detect damage to or physiological alteration of brain function."

Being clinically recognized and being admissible in a Texas courtroom are separate questions.

The gate is Rule 702 plus Robinson. Texas Rule of Evidence 702 permits a qualified expert to give an opinion "if the expert's scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue." E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. Robinson, 923 S.W.2d 549 (Tex. 1995), requires the proponent to show the testimony is relevant and rests on a reliable foundation, and sets out non-exclusive factors aimed at the methodology itself.

Havner closes the second half of the gate. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Havner, 953 S.W.2d 706 (Tex. 1997), holds that an opinion built on unreliable underlying data is inadmissible, and that an opinion can fail even where the underlying data is sound if the expert reaches the conclusion through flawed methodology. In an imaging fight this is the live issue. The technique may be well established as a research tool while the specific inferential step — from this individual's scan to this individual's cognitive complaints — is where the analytical gap opens.

How we handle it in practice. Advanced imaging is treated as corroboration and never as the spine of the case. The spine is the neuropsychological testing, the treating physicians, the medical records, and the witnesses in the next section. Where advanced imaging is offered, it comes in through a properly qualified neuroradiologist who can defend the acquisition protocol, the control comparison, and the specific inference being drawn, and we assume a challenge is coming rather than hoping it is not.

The before-and-after witnesses who decide these cases

Twelve people from Travis County are not going to resolve a battle of neuropsychologists by deciding whose statistical methodology they prefer. They will decide whether the person in front of them has changed. That is a question ordinary witnesses can answer, and it is the most persuasive evidence in a contested brain injury case.

The testimony that works is specific and small.

• The spouse or partner. Not "he is different." He used to handle the bills and now he cannot, and here is the month it started, and here are the late notices.
• The supervisor or crew lead. He was the person we sent to the hard jobs. In March we stopped putting him on anything with a sequence, and here is the schedule showing it.
• A coworker. He asks me the same question two or three times a shift now.
• A teacher or professor, for a young client. She was a B student and she is failing the same course she was passing before, and here are the two transcripts.
• A bandmate, a coach, a training partner, a chess club, a church group. Whoever saw the person do a demanding thing repeatedly, week after week, and can say what happened to it.
• An adult child, for an older client — the person who noticed that mom stopped driving at night and stopped hosting.

We ask for the mundane version of the story. Names, dates, one incident described in full. A witness who says the client is "just not the same" gives the jury an adjective. A witness who describes standing in a parking lot for ten minutes because the client could not remember where they had parked gives the jury a scene, and a scene survives cross-examination.

If you are the family member who noticed first, start writing things down now. What happened, the date, who else saw it. Nobody's memory holds a year of small moments, and the small moments are the case.

Impairment, mental anguish and disfigurement as separate jury questions

Texas does not ask a jury for one lump number. The damages question in a Texas negligence case is broken into separate elements, each asked separately for the past and for the future, and each answered with its own dollar figure. In a brain injury case the elements that carry the weight are the non-economic ones, which is why this section is longer than the rest of the damages discussion. For the economic categories — medical care, lost wages, and diminished earning capacity — see /compensation/medical-expenses, /compensation/lost-wages, and /compensation/loss-of-earning-capacity.

Physical pain. Headache is the most under-described injury in these files. Post-traumatic headache can be daily, it can be triggered by screens, noise and light, and it is a physical symptom with a physical answer.

Mental anguish. A separate element from pain, and in a brain injury case a substantial one: the anxiety of losing words in front of other people, the irritability that damages relationships, the depression that follows losing work you were good at, the fear that this is permanent. /compensation/emotional-distress covers this element in general terms.

Physical impairment. This is the element that matters most here, and it is genuinely distinct from pain. Texas law treats physical impairment as its own question, and Golden Eagle Archery, Inc. v. Jackson, 116 S.W.3d 757 (Tex. 2003), addresses the requirement that an award for physical impairment reflect a loss that does not overlap the other elements the jury has been asked about. Practically, this is the element that captures the things you no longer do: the hobby you gave up, the second job you cannot hold, the reading you cannot sustain, the driving you have stopped doing at night, the parenting you cannot do the way you used to. It gets proved with the same before-and-after witnesses from the section above, and it gets lost when a case is presented as nothing but bills and pain.

Disfigurement. In a head-injury case this is a real element for a client with a craniotomy scar, a surgical defect, a scalp laceration or hardware, and it is often overlooked because the focus is cognitive. /compensation/disability-and-disfigurement covers the category.

The eggshell plaintiff, and the aggravation instruction

A defendant takes the plaintiff as it finds them. A prior concussion, an ADHD diagnosis, a learning difference, a psychiatric history or an earlier crash does not defeat the claim. A person who was more vulnerable to this injury because of who they already were is still entitled to recover for what this incident did to them.

What the rule changes is the shape of the proof. The Texas Pattern Jury Charges include an aggravation instruction that tells the jury to exclude any amount for a condition that existed before the occurrence, except to the extent that the pre-existing condition was aggravated by injuries resulting from the occurrence. So the treating and testifying experts have to be able to draw the line: this is where he was before, this is where he is now, and this is the part attributable to the collision. That line is drawn with the baseline records described in the neuropsychological section, which is the reason we start collecting them early instead of waiting for the defense to raise the issue.

The caps question, answered once and correctly

There is no cap on non-economic damages in an ordinary Texas negligence case. A car crash, a fall, a struck-by injury — no cap. Two real caps exist and neither one is general:

• Health care liability claims. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 74.301 limits non-economic damages to $250,000 per claimant against a physician or health care provider other than a health care institution, $250,000 per claimant against a single health care institution, and — where judgment runs against more than one institution — $250,000 per institution with a $500,000 aggregate per claimant under § 74.301(c).
• Exemplary damages. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 41.008(b) caps exemplary damages at the greater of $200,000, or twice economic damages plus non-economic damages found by the jury up to $750,000. Exemplary damages are a separate finding on separate proof and are not part of the compensatory question.

Where a brain injury also involves catastrophic lifelong care needs, the cost side of that analysis is covered on our Austin spinal cord injury page rather than duplicated here.

When the injured person cannot manage their own case

Some brain injuries take away the capacity to run a lawsuit. The client cannot follow the proceedings, cannot weigh a settlement offer, cannot sign a release with an understanding of what they are giving up. Texas has machinery for this, and picking the right piece of it matters.

Next friend, Tex. R. Civ. P. 44. The rule provides that "minors, lunatics, idiots, or persons non compos mentis who have no legal guardian may sue and be represented by 'next friend'" — the statutory language is archaic and the mechanism is ordinary. A spouse, parent or adult child brings the suit on the injured person's behalf. Rule 44 also requires that a next friend's compromise of the suit be approved by the court, and a judgment approved that way is binding.

Guardianship, Tex. Est. Code ch. 1101. A full guardianship of an incapacitated adult is a significant step and Texas courts do not grant it casually. Under § 1101.101 the court must find by clear and convincing evidence that the person is incapacitated, that a guardianship is in their best interest, and — this is the part families do not expect — that alternatives to guardianship and available supports and services were considered and determined not to be feasible. Section 1101.103 requires a written letter or certificate from a licensed physician, or from a qualified licensed psychologist where the alleged incapacity results from a mental condition. In this county those applications are heard in the Travis County Probate Courts at 200 W. 8th St. in downtown Austin.

A court-created management trust, Tex. Est. Code ch. 1301. Section 1301.054 lets a probate court create a trust to manage the estate of an alleged incapacitated person who has no guardian, after a hearing and findings that the person is incapacitated and that the trust is in their best interests. For many families this is the alternative that answers the § 1101.101 question, because it solves the money problem without stripping the person of every legal right.

Court management of the recovery, Tex. Prop. Code § 142.001. Where a minor or an incapacitated person with no legal guardian is represented by a next friend or a guardian ad litem, the court may provide by decree for the investment of the funds accruing to that person under the judgment.

And the tolling rule. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.001 provides that a person is under a legal disability if they are younger than 18 or "of unsound mind," and the time of the disability is not included in a limitations period. Read subsection (d) before relying on it: "a disability that arises after a limitations period starts does not suspend the running of the period." For a brain injury caused by the same event that started the clock, that subsection is the whole ballgame, and it is a reason to get in front of a lawyer early rather than late.

We will tell a family straight which of these tools their situation calls for, including when the answer is that none of them is needed yet.

Children, older adults, and second-impact risk

Children and teenagers

CDC's clinical guidance for mild TBI in children 18 and younger recommends against routine imaging — its checklist states "Do not image routinely (including CT & MRI)" and directs clinicians to validated decision rules instead. So the absence of a scan in a child's chart reflects the standard of care rather than the absence of an injury, and any argument to the contrary is arguing with CDC.

Injured children carry evidence adults do not. Report cards, standardized test scores, attendance records, teacher comments, and any 504 plan or special education referral that appeared after the incident. A child whose grades fell off a cliff in the semester following a crash has documented their own before-and-after in a way an adult rarely can.

For limitations, § 16.001 tolls the period while a person is younger than 18. That does not make delay a good idea. Witnesses move, video is overwritten, and vehicles are repaired or scrapped.

Older adults

The data is unambiguous about who is being injured. CDC reports adults 75 and older accounted for about 32% of TBI-related hospitalizations and 28% of TBI-related deaths, and states that "older adults are more likely to be hospitalized and die from a TBI compared to all other age groups." Texas's own registry shows the same shape: 4,423 TBI records for adults 65 and older in 2021, more than any other age band.

Two problems recur in these files. Anticoagulants make a slow bleed after an apparently minor head strike far more dangerous, and the deterioration can arrive hours or days later. And the cognitive change gets attributed to age — by the family, sometimes by the physician, and always by the defense. Documented function before the incident is what answers that: the driving, the bills, the independent living, the routines that were intact the week before and were not the month after.

Repeat injuries

CDC states that "a person with a history of multiple or repeated mild TBIs or concussions may experience a longer recovery or more severe symptoms." For anyone who has had a prior concussion, that is a medical reason to be evaluated after a new head strike instead of waiting it out. In a claim, the prior injury is not a defense — it is the eggshell-plaintiff situation described above, and it makes contemporaneous documentation of the new event more important, not less.

The filing deadline and the fault fight in a head-injury case

Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003(a) requires a personal injury suit to be filed no later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues. Texas does recognize a discovery rule, and Childs v. Haussecker, 974 S.W.2d 31 (Tex. 1998), confines it to injuries that are inherently undiscoverable and objectively verifiable, decided categorically rather than on your particular facts — which means nobody should treat delayed cognitive symptoms as a reason the clock restarted.

Comparative responsibility, and the trap specific to this injury

Texas apportions fault under Chapter 33 of the Civil Practice & Remedies Code. Section 33.001 is the bar: a claimant may not recover damages if their percentage of responsibility is greater than 50 percent. Below that line, the recovery is reduced by the percentage assigned.

Here is the part that is specific to brain injuries. Chapter 33 is about responsibility for the incident. What happens in practice is that post-injury behaviour gets dragged into the same conversation — missed medical appointments, an inconsistent symptom history, a form filled out wrong, a physical therapy course abandoned halfway. That behaviour gets characterized as non-cooperation, or as a failure to mitigate, or simply as evidence the person was never that hurt.

It is frequently the symptom. Impaired executive function is impaired scheduling, impaired follow-through, and impaired recall of your own history. We deal with this by having the treating provider or the neuropsychologist address it directly, on the record, so that the jury hears the disorganization explained as a consequence of the injury by the clinician who examined the person rather than as a character assessment offered by a defense lawyer.

What to do in the first thirty days after a head strike

Ordered by how quickly the evidence disappears.

1. Get evaluated, and say the word "head." Tell the clinician your head was struck or your head moved suddenly, and describe every symptom including the ones that feel unrelated — sleep, mood, noise sensitivity, light sensitivity, word-finding. The chart is built from what you report.
2. Request the EMS run report, not only the hospital records. The paramedic's narrative often contains the observations that matter most — whether you were confused at the scene, whether you repeated questions, what bystanders said. It is a separate record from the hospital chart and it has to be requested separately.
3. Find your GCS and note who recorded it and when. It will appear in the EMS record and again at triage. Its value and its timing are both part of the argument later.
4. Start a dated symptom log today. Phone notes are fine. Date, what happened, how long it lasted. Ten seconds a day. This is the single highest-value thing a client does in the first month.
5. Ask your physician for a referral to a neurologist or a concussion clinic. A primary-care note saying "post-concussive symptoms" does more for you than three months of waiting to see whether it resolves.
6. Gather your own baseline documents. Transcripts, performance reviews, productivity reports, attendance records, any prior testing. Get them while you still have access — people lose access to employer systems when the job ends.
7. Tell one person at work and one person at home what is happening. They become your witnesses, and their memory of when it started is more reliable than yours by definition.
8. Photograph everything physical. Vehicle damage, the interior, a cracked windshield or a deployed airbag, the stair or the floor surface, and any visible injury. Damage patterns get repaired quickly and surfaces get cleaned.
9. Preserve any video before it is overwritten. Business cameras, doorbell cameras, dash cameras, transit and school-bus systems. Most retain footage for days, not months, and a written preservation request has to reach the owner inside that window.
10. Stay off social media about the incident and about your health. Assume everything public is collected.
11. Do not give a recorded statement to the other driver's insurer while you are still working out what your own symptoms are. "I feel fine" said in week one is quoted back in year two.
12. Bring somebody with you to appointments. A person with a head injury frequently under-reports symptoms because they cannot recall the last three days accurately. A second set of ears fixes that, and it also produces a witness.

What it costs to run a contested brain injury case

We work these cases on a contingency fee. There is no hourly bill, no retainer, and no charge for the consultation. Our fee is a percentage of what we recover, and if there is no recovery there is no fee.

Case expenses are a separate thing from the fee, and it is worth understanding what they buy in this kind of case, because a brain injury file is expense-heavy in a very particular way. The money does not go to reconstructing a crash. It goes to proving the injury:

• A full neuropsychological evaluation — most of a day of a specialist's time, plus scoring, interpretation and a written report.
• Records collection from every provider you saw, including the ER, EMS, primary care, neurology, therapy and any prior treatment relevant to the baseline.
• Retrieval of the baseline material — school records, employment files, prior testing — much of which arrives only under a records request or a subpoena.
• Depositions of the treating physicians, which in a head-injury case are frequently the difference between the diagnosis being real to a jury and being a piece of paper.
• Where advanced imaging is in play, a neuroradiologist qualified to defend the protocol and the inference under Rule 702.
• Trial presentation of testing results, which are numbers and tables that have to be made comprehensible to twelve people in an afternoon.

We advance those costs. You do not write a check while the case is pending. Costs are repaid out of the recovery at the end, and the fee agreement states the percentages and the cost treatment in writing before you sign anything. If we look at a file and conclude the proof is not there — that the records will not support the diagnosis, or that the liability picture makes the expense irrational — we will say so at the consultation rather than sign it up and let you find out in eighteen months.

Past results do not guarantee future results. Every case is different.

Brain injury care and support in the Austin area

A short, factual list. We have no financial relationship with any of these and we do not receive or pay anything for a referral.

• Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas, downtown Austin, is the adult Level I trauma center for the region. If you were transported after a serious crash inside Austin, this is frequently where you went. — ascension.org
• Texas HHS Comprehensive Rehabilitation Services (CRS) assists eligible Texans with a traumatic brain injury or traumatic spinal cord injury to function independently at home and in the community, and includes inpatient rehabilitation, post-acute rehabilitation and outpatient therapy service arrays. Eligibility and timing rules apply. — hhs.texas.gov/services/disability/comprehensive-rehabilitation-services-crs
• Texas HHS Office of Acquired Brain Injury (OABI), 512-706-7191, oabi@hhsc.state.tx.us — hhs.texas.gov/services/disability/acquired-brain-injury
• 2-1-1 Texas — dial 2-1-1 for referrals to local services, transportation and benefits help.
• CDC's own patient-facing pages on mild TBI and concussion are plain-language and worth reading before your next appointment — cdc.gov/traumatic-brain-injury/about

Applying to a public program does not affect a claim, and a claim does not disqualify you from applying. Ask us before you sign anything a program sends you, because some documents contain subrogation or reimbursement language that matters later.

Who handles your case

Israel Ruiz Medina — Founding Partner. Texas Bar No. 24130487. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Member, Texas Trial Lawyers Association; Travis County Bar Association; Austin Bar Association; American Association for Justice. Full bio

Rikki Olivia Medina — Founding Partner. Texas Bar No. 24144569. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Full bio

You will know which of us is handling your file, and you will be able to reach that person.

Questions we get after a head injury

What people ask us after a head injury that did not show up on the scan.

Related pages on this site

• Spinal cord injury and lifetime care
• Head injuries in a motorcycle crash
• Head injuries on a job site
• Car and truck collisions in the Austin metro
• Injury types explained
• Pain and suffering

Talk to us about the head injury

This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts. Past results do not guarantee future results.