Birth Injury – Cerebral Palsy

This debilitating condition can lead to large verdicts for it's victims.

MR. ZUCKER: Cerebral palsy is damage to the brain. Again, the brain being the cerebellum. Cerebral palsy can be caused by a compromise to the blood supply to the brain, it can be caused by bleeding which occurs in the brain during the course of delivery as a result of unnecessary trauma inflicted upon the child’s brain during the delivery. Children with cerebral palsy are typically challenged physically during their entire lifetimes, they need special equipment to deal with these physical challenges. Again, if they're mentally damaged as well then they need additional assistance because they're coping not only with physical injury but with severe mental injury as well. The damages that we've been able to recover on these cases are substantial because of the devastating and substantial nature of the injury. The courts have allowed the settlement money to be used while the children are still under 18 years old. Usually the courts allow immediate access to those monies to buy whatever necessary equipment the child needs, sometimes to allow the purchase of a home, sometimes to allow the purchase of a swimming pool if the child needs aquatherapy, to provide for payment for a physical therapist to come to the home, to provide for special equipment, to provide for special vans. We typically provide in these types of cases for lifetime payments to the child so that the child is never without funds. It’s a real tragedy when we see it and we see it too often here. But in those cases we’ve been very successful in helping those families.