Personal Injury Lawyers on the Hidden Costs of Serious Accidents

If you mentioned Liam (name changed for privacy) to one of his high school classmates, they’d probably tell you about the time he led his school to a state football championship. To those who cheered him on, he represented the best of what his school had to offer.

 At 24, having recently graduated college, he still had a bright future ahead of him. But one moment behind the wheel changed everything.

One day, while Liam was easing out of a gas station parking lot, his vehicle was struck by a heavy truck. The violent impact left him with a traumatic brain injury and rendered him comatose for over five months. When he woke up, the former football captain could no longer walk unassisted, use the bathroom by himself, or do the simplest tasks without help.

Beyond the emotional toll of grappling with the tragedy that befell their son, Liam’s parents also had to deal with his hospital bills. They knew his ongoing medical care would cost money—he would need a wheelchair, for example—but they didn’t anticipate all the extra costs beyond medical bills.

Just taking Liam home required his family to buy a van outfitted with a lifting device for his wheelchair. Their house, which had narrow hallways and small bathrooms, was not designed for wheelchair users. And while Liam’s rehabilitation plan included learning to use a walker, the home’s small bedrooms did not have enough space for all the equipment necessary for his at-home physical therapy. Major renovations would be necessary to accommodate Liam’s care. By the time the expenses of these renovations were added up, the insurance providers associated with Liam’s workers’ compensation claim were urging the family to simplify matters by moving to a whole new house. 

But the last thing Liam and his family wanted to do was leave. His parents had lived in the family home for many years, and their close ties to the community had been a source of strength during the most difficult moment of their lives. The emotional cost of giving that community up was the one price they could not imagine paying. 

As this true story from one of our clients goes to show, the expenses associated with serious injury take many forms—few of which victims and their families anticipate when they first begin to deal with the aftermath of a serious accident. Discover some of the unexpected costs our personal injury clients have encountered.

Need to Know:

• Many hidden expenses to personal injury victims have to do with ordinary needs—such as food, travel, and accommodation—which take on new complexities due to their injuries.
• A good personal injury attorney strives to present every hidden cost as part of their case so their clients can be fairly compensated.

In This Article:

• Lifelong Costs of Medical Accommodations
• Navigating the World with a Disability or Serious Injury
• Costs of Nutrition for Accident Patients
• Costs of Housing & Accommodations
• Costs of Losing Physical Mobility
• Case Study: $4,925,000 for Young Man Who Suffered Traumatic Brain Injury After Car Crash
• Case Study: $5,500,000 for Client Who Lost His Sense of Direction Following Accident
• Case Study: $9,000,000 for Minor With Permanent Injuries After Being Crushed by a Collapsed Wall

Lifelong Costs of Medical Accommodations

It’s rare for an injured person’s problems to be solved by just one device, mobility aid, medicine, or therapeutic treatment. Many victims will require care for the rest of their lives, in the form of accessibility aids (such as wheelchairs), therapy, or medication. The same patient’s injuries might require a wheelchair for some situations and crutches or a walker for others, and the cost of medical devices—such as catheters, spinal cord stimulators, or adaptive pillows—similarly add up. A patient may be prescribed one medication to deal with the results of an injury or surgery and another to counter a side effect of the first medication.

Furthermore, few or none of these items will be a one-time purchase. Devices and mobility aids, from wheelchairs to prosthetics, wear out over time and need to be replaced, while the costs of medications may rise after years of use.

Navigating the World With a Disability or Serious Injury

The new van that Liam’s family needed for his wheelchair represents just one example of the potential costs of transportation for injured patients. Some accident victims may need new devices—such as brakes controlled by hand—to help them drive. Those who are left unable to drive may need to use public transportation, but this comes with its own costs. Public buses and trains can be difficult to navigate if you use mobility aids, and not all areas have robust public transit systems.

Those who are unable to use public transportation may come to rely on rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft. These services tend to be more expensive than public transportation, and using them frequently, or to travel long distances, quickly adds up to hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Worse, injured patients and their families are often required to do more traveling than ever for medical appointments. Under the best of circumstances, frequent doctor’s visits and physical therapy appointments can be a significant drain on gas expenses. Even those with access to inexpensive public transportation can quickly see the costs pile up—and this doesn’t even account for the mental and physical exhaustion that comes with traveling with an injury or disability.

Costs of Nutrition for Accident Patients

A person seriously injured in an accident isn’t just recovering—in many cases, he or she is adjusting to a body with a whole new set of demands. Those demands may include particular dietary needs.

Many of our clients struggle with adequate nutrition when put on a liquid diet or forced to use a feeding tube. In other cases, clients who have lost mobility start to lose muscle mass, making it difficult to maintain a healthy weight. Often, families and caretakers need to prepare special meals to keep their loved ones healthy.

Block O’Toole & Murphy once handled a case for a client who had become quadriplegic following a construction accident. Our client, an immigrant from Ecuador, rapidly lost weight due to the deterioration of his muscles, and he found himself unable to stomach the food served at the institution where he was recovering.

His mother’s solution to this problem wasn’t cheap, but it was highly effective: she brought him homecooked meals six out of seven days of the week. (Partner Scott Occhiogrosso helped her on Sundays by bringing him food from a local restaurant.)

As you can imagine, the benefits of these meals went far beyond their nutritional value. They connected our client to his culture and to a family who loved him enough to provide for him. They gave him something positive to look forward to. (One of the indulgences he most anticipated was the mint tea his mother brought with dinner.) At a time in his life when much was out of his control, he was able to enjoy the human pleasure of a good meal—something too many patients miss out on.

Our client’s mother was more than happy to do this for her son, but it wasn’t easy for her. The cost of travel expenses and ingredients put an additional strain on her finances, and she spent extra effort and time to ensure the dishes were healthy and nutritious for a recovering patient. Occhiogrosso and O’Toole fought hard to settle his case for an undisclosed amount, ensuring that these and other efforts made to care for him would not set the family back in any way.

Costs of Housing & Accommodations

Anyone who has spent even a few days in a hospital understands the heavy financial toll of extended hospital stays on injured patients, even on the best possible insurance plan. If an injured person is institutionalized—permanently or temporarily—the financial burden grows still greater.

As Liam’s case shows, costs associated with accommodation don’t always stop when an injured person is released from a hospital or a rehabilitation center. In fact, many releases are conditional on the patient’s family spending even more money. If an accident victim’s home needs to be made accessible—as Liam’s did—medical professionals are often required to make sure that the family has made all of the recommended adjustments before they are permitted to release their patient.

Loved ones may also find themselves facing extra expenses when it comes to temporary or permanent accommodation. For example, the facility where Liam was hospitalized was a long drive from his parents’ house. During his months of hospitalization, his father spent many nights at a nearby hotel to ensure that he would be on call if any change occurred in his son’s condition.

Costs of Losing Physical Mobility

For most people, the work they do isn’t limited to their jobs. To illustrate, many of our clients—particularly those who work in construction and other areas of physical labor—are skilled when it comes to home repairs and DIY projects. After years of relying on these skills, they and their families may find themselves burdened by extra costs if their injuries get in the way of their usual responsibilities. They may be forced to hire gardeners or landscapers if they can no longer tend to the property, cooks if they can no longer prepare food, or nannies and daycare providers if they can no longer handle childcare.

Although these costs may appear straightforward, they often come at a heavier emotional price. Many of our clients feel a stronger connection with the work they do at home—whether it’s saving money by handling repairs themselves, tending to a beloved garden, or actively caring for their children—than the work they do for their employers. In some cases, being forced to outsource these tasks strikes at the heart of a client’s identity more so than any other consequence of being injured.

When our attorneys demonstrate the financial costs incurred by hiring outside help, they also go out of their way to highlight the emotional cost. Sometimes our attorneys speak to witnesses—family members, neighbors, or friends—who can testify to a client’s pride in the work that he or she has been forced to give up. In some cases, we have made a “day in the life” video in which we follow a client throughout a typical day, demonstrating the precise help that he or she needs and what it costs in both financial and emotional terms.

Case Study: $4,925,000 for Young Man Who Suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury After a Car Crash

Liam was injured while he was on the job, so Block O’Toole & Murphy partner Daniel O’Toole—who handled this case along with partner Frederick Aranki—quickly began arranging for him to receive workers’ compensation. While he and Aranki tirelessly worked on their lawsuit against the employers of the driver that hit Liam’s vehicle, O’Toole remained in constant communication with the workers’ compensation insurance providers, keeping them briefed on the consequences of the accident for Liam’s family and detailing the costs of the treatments Liam would need in order to get better.

At one point, O’Toole and Aranki even arranged to meet with the insurance providers at Liam’s house. This step was partly made to accommodate Liam’s parents, who needed to be by their son’s side at all times. But by bringing the insurance providers directly to the family home, O’Toole and Aranki were able to show them firsthand how the intended renovations might work. They demonstrated how, far from being impractical, these renovations were eminently doable and would improve the quality of Liam’s life, convincing them that they would be worth the expense.

By the end of the case against the truck and his employer, O’Toole and Aranki had not only achieved a settlement of $4,925,000 for Liam and his family, but they also successfully negotiated with the workers’ compensation providers to pay for all medical treatments Liam would need as a result of the accident for the remainder of his life. 

Case Study: $5,500,000 for Client Who Lost His Sense of Direction Following Accident

Not all accessibility issues can be addressed by renovating a home—sometimes moving is the only option. One of our clients, a Brooklyn electrician, suffered a traumatic brain injury when he fell from a 28-foot ladder on a construction site. No mats, safety nets or other means of protection were in place, and when he fell, his head made direct contact with cement. This accident disabled our client from work and left him with memory loss and other cognitive impairments, one of which was a severely compromised sense of direction and space.

Navigating Brooklyn, which had once come naturally to our client, became overwhelming and then dangerous. He would end up hopelessly lost if he attempted to ride the subway, and even familiar streets bewildered him. It soon became clear that he would need to relocate to a quieter area for his own safety.

While handling the case, partners Stephen J. Murphy and David L. Scher searched for a living space that would suit his needs. They were able to find him an apartment in a building with a doorman who could direct him to his room and floor if he became confused. Although our client was already receiving workers’ compensation for his injury, Murphy and Scher worked to secure him a loan that would pay his lease for a full year in advance.

Moving, particularly when you hadn’t planned for it, has hidden costs of its own. None of our client’s existing furniture fit his new apartment, and he had no choice but to leave most of it behind. A few members of our firm accompanied him to a furniture store to help him find replacements using the money left over from the loan.

Meanwhile, by demonstrating that our client had not had adequate protection while climbing the ladder, Murphy and Scher were eventually able to achieve a pretrial settlement of $5,500,000. This money would pay for the lifelong home attendant visits our client needed and ensure he would be able to remain in his new home, with all the safety and independence those circumstances allowed.

Case Study: $9,000,000 for Minor With Permanent Injuries After Being Crushed by a Collapsed Wall

Sometimes the greatest losses are the hardest ones to demonstrate. Take one case that Block O’Toole & Murphy handled, in which a 14-year-old boy suffered a devastating injury while spending time with his friends at a local mall. As he and his friends waited in the parking lot for their parents to pick them up, our young client absent-mindedly reached out to grab the top of a cinderblock wall that was used to fence in electrical equipment.

As partners Daniel O’Toole & Frederick Aranki, who handled the case, would later discover when they obtained photos of the wall being built, the steel rebar framing used to reinforce the wall from the inside was incomplete and did not extend all the way to the top. The top of the wall crumbled abruptly from that slight pressure, and the boy’s right arm—which was also his dominant arm—was crushed by falling cinderblocks.

The damage to our client’s dominant arm was so serious that he had to undergo multiple surgeries to avoid the necessity of amputation. Even following reconstruction of the elbow area and grafts from his leg to replace the missing skin, his grip was significantly weakened, and limitations to his range of elbow motion proved permanent.

Before his injury, our client had been interested in entering the police force, which had seemed like a promising idea—he had been a strong and active young man who kickboxed and participated in his high school’s wrestling team. The type of highly physical job he had hoped for was now out of the question, and his career prospects in the law enforcement field were limited to those he could manage from a desk.

In personal injury law, you can’t claim lost wages for a career you never had the opportunity to start. Still, O’Toole and Aranki felt it was important for the defense to understand how our client’s injuries had limited his options for the future. They made claims, not only for our client’s future medical costs, but for loss of employment opportunities. To make those lost opportunities clear, they hired an economist to provide salary estimates of what our client might have earned in the type of law enforcement role he had aspired to.

The defendants in the case pointed out, correctly, that our client was still very young and might have chosen to pursue a less active career even if he hadn’t been injured. Yet this was exactly the point that O’Toole and Aranki were highlighting: the freedom to make that decision had been taken away from their client before he was old enough to make it.

Thanks to their persistent efforts to convey what the accident had cost him—and how it had resulted from the negligence of multiple defendants, including the construction company that built the wall, the shoe company that leased the property, and the property manager—our handling attorneys were able to settle the case on his behalf for $9,000,000.

Free Legal Consultation

If you or a loved one is injured in a serious accident, you may find your shock, fear, and pain compounded by unexpected expenses. It’s important to hire a lawyer who won’t be taken by surprise. The attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy have extensive experience litigating catastrophic injury lawsuits and are sharply attuned to the costs that other lawyers may not consider. We make all costs to our clients—both financial and emotional—an important part of each case, ensuring that they have the best chance of being fully compensated.

Our attorneys handle serious injury cases throughout New Jersey and New York. To learn more about our track record, visit our Verdicts and Settlements page. If you have questions about your case or want to discuss what damages you may claim in a personal injury lawsuit, please contact Block O’Toole & Murphy by calling 212-736-5300, or by filling out our online contact form.