Your personal injury lawyer isn’t going to magically know about your case. They don’t have dreams about which doctors you went to, which doctors you are going to see, what hurts you, who witnessed the accident, if there was a police report, what the property damage looks like, etc. In other words, your attorney is not psychic. You actually need to provide all this information to your attorney. Don’t assume all your health care providers are simply communicating with your attorney. Even if you make your health care providers know about your lawyer, many of them may not cooperate. You need to let your lawyer know about all the important information. During the first meeting with the attorney, you need to bring everything that could help. To learn more, check out this video regarding what to bring to your first consultation with your personal injury lawyer. 

In some cases, significant car accidents, especially side-impact auto accidents can cause hip injuries or aggravation of a pre-existing hip problem.  Trauma from a car accident to the hip can lead to very severe fractures. 

The treatment of these injuries can require the use of plates and rods or the revision of the hip replacement entirely with placement of a new, long femoral component to span the fracture.  The key in these kinds of injury cases is causation.  Was there is “mechanism of injury?”  The main question is whether or not the accident actually caused the hip injury.  Just because you have a hip problem doesn’t mean you get to blame a car accident.  If you had a pre-existing problem in your hip, the accident may have “aggravated” the condition but not necessarily made it worse.  Close consultation with a hip replacement surgeon is critical when it comes to hip injury and car accident personal injury cases.

While rotator cuff tears are often associated with repetitive use of the shoulder, you can have a traumatically induced rotator cuff tear. The rotator cuff is composed of muscles and tendons which can get injured when there is direct impact to the shoulder from a side impact, for example. However, another common way for the rotator cuff to become injured is when an individual braces for a rear end collision. By holding the steering wheel tightly in anticipation of an impact, they tighten the shoulder muscles and tendons, making it more likely for injury to occur. To learn more about rotator cuff injuries and car accidents, please visit my library article.