A traumatic brain injury is the one serious injury that often does not show up on a scan, which is exactly why a New Jersey brain injury lawyer has to understand the medicine as well as the law.
Reinartz Law Firm represents people with head and brain injuries from our office in Hackensack, serving Bergen County and the rest of the state. We build these cases on neuropsychological evidence and treating-physician testimony, because a clean CT scan is the argument the other side will lead with.
If you or someone in your family is dealing with memory problems, headaches, personality changes, or difficulty at work after a head injury, you are not imagining it, and you are not exaggerating it.
Call us at (201) 289-8614 for a free consultation. Richard Reinartz spent more than a decade as a trial lawyer at two large national firms handling the defense of injury claims before founding this practice, so he knows precisely how a brain injury claim gets picked apart and how to build one that holds.
How Is the Severity of a Brain Injury Measured?
Severity is classified using four data points recorded at or near the time of injury: the Glasgow Coma Scale score, the duration of any loss of consciousness, the length of post-traumatic amnesia, and what imaging shows.
These are the numbers an insurer's reviewing physician will look for first, and their absence from an emergency room chart is frequently treated as proof that nothing happened.
Glasgow Coma Scale
The Glasgow Coma Scale rates eye opening, verbal response, and motor response on a combined scale of 3 to 15. A score of 13 to 15 is generally classified as mild, 9 to 12 as moderate, and 8 or below as severe. The score is a snapshot of one moment, though, so a person who scores 15 in the emergency department can still have a lasting injury.
Loss of consciousness and post-traumatic amnesia
Loss of consciousness for under 30 minutes points toward mild injury, while longer periods indicate moderate to severe. Post-traumatic amnesia, meaning the stretch of time a person cannot form continuous memories after the event, is often the more telling measure.
A patient who cannot recall the ambulance ride or the first day in the hospital has meaningful evidence, and it is frequently absent from the chart because nobody asked.
What imaging can and cannot show
A CT scan is built to find bleeding and skull fractures, which is why it is the right first test in an emergency and the wrong test for proving a mild or moderate injury. Diffuse axonal injury, the shearing of nerve fibers caused by rotational force, involves damage at a scale that standard imaging simply does not resolve.
Advanced MRI sequences and diffusion tensor imaging can sometimes capture it, and we pursue that imaging when the clinical picture calls for it.
Why "mild" is a misleading word
Mild traumatic brain injury is a classification of the initial event, not a prediction about outcome. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that symptoms may not appear for hours or days, and that people with repeated injuries can face longer recoveries and lasting problems. Plenty of people classified as mild never return to the work they did before.
Taken together, these four measures tell us where the medical record is strong and where it needs to be built out. Reviewing them is one of the first things we do on a head injury case.
What Causes Traumatic Brain Injuries in New Jersey?
Motor vehicle crashes and falls account for the majority of the brain injury cases we handle, with workplace incidents close behind. The mechanism matters legally because it determines who is accountable and which insurance applies.
Car, truck, and motorcycle crashes
A brain does not need to strike anything to be injured. Rapid acceleration and deceleration alone can produce a coup-contrecoup injury, where the brain moves within the skull and is damaged on both sides. This is why highway-speed collisions on Route 17, Route 4, and Interstate 80 produce brain injuries even when the airbag deployed and the head never hit the window.
Falls
Falls are a leading cause of head injury across every age group, and they raise a different legal question: whether a property owner or manager knew about a hazard, or should have known, and failed to address it within a reasonable time. Stairs, poor lighting, uneven walkways, and untreated ice are the recurring culprits in northern New Jersey winters.
Workplace and construction incidents
Struck-by incidents and falls from height are common sources of occupational brain injury. Workers' compensation through the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development covers medical treatment and a portion of lost wages, but it does not pay for pain and suffering. A separate claim against a negligent third party often can, and our NJ traumatic brain injury attorneys handle both tracks together.
Pedestrian and bicycle collisions
With no vehicle structure absorbing the impact, head injury rates in these cases are high, and helmets reduce risk without removing it. Hackensack's downtown grid sits inside a ring of high-volume arterials, and that combination produces a steady stream of these cases.
Whatever the mechanism, the early investigation looks similar: preserve the scene evidence, secure the vehicle or incident data, and get the medical documentation started properly.
Why Are Brain Injury Claims So Often Undervalued?
Brain injury claims get undervalued because the harm is invisible and the person often looks fine. There is no cast, no scar, and no limp, and the deficits show up in places an adjuster never sees.
A person with a moderate TBI may hold a normal conversation for 20 minutes and then be unable to follow a two-step instruction an hour later. Fatigue, irritability, word-finding difficulty, and slowed processing are the everyday realities, and none of them appear in a radiology report.
There is a second problem, which is that the injured person is frequently the least reliable narrator of their own deficits. Loss of self-awareness is itself a symptom, so many people genuinely believe they are managing when their family can see clearly that they are not.
That is why we build these cases through other people. Spouses, coworkers, supervisors, and teachers describe the before and after in concrete terms, and that testimony is often more persuasive than any single test result.
What Medical Evidence Does a TBI Claim Require?
A credible brain injury claim rests on objective testing, treating-physician opinion, and documented functional change, not on a diagnosis code alone. The evidence we assemble typically includes the following:
- Emergency and hospital records, read closely for Glasgow Coma Scale scores, amnesia notes, and mechanism of injury descriptions.
- Neuropsychological testing that measures memory, attention, processing speed, and executive function against normed benchmarks.
- Advanced imaging where clinically indicated, including MRI sequences designed to detect diffuse axonal injury.
- Treating neurologist, neuropsychologist, and rehabilitation physician narratives on prognosis and permanency.
- Vestibular, vision, and balance assessments, since these deficits are common and commonly missed.
- Employment records, performance reviews, and attendance data showing the change in capacity at work.
- Statements from family, friends, and colleagues describing specific differences in day-to-day function.
Gaps in that record are the most common reason a strong case settles for less than it should. When you come to us early, we can help make sure the right testing happens and the right questions get asked while the information is still recoverable.
The Lifetime Cost of a Traumatic Brain Injury
Serious brain injuries generate costs that continue long after the medical treatment plateaus. Valuing one properly means projecting decades forward rather than totaling what has been billed.
In significant cases, we work with a life care planner to itemize and price the road ahead, which commonly includes cognitive rehabilitation, speech and occupational therapy, neuropsychiatric care, medication management, and supervision or assistance with daily tasks.
Vocational retraining belongs on that list where a return to some work is realistic, along with the cost of case management for families who cannot coordinate care themselves.
The earnings side is often the largest single component. A person who can no longer sustain concentration for a full shift has lost earning capacity, which is a broader concept than lost wages and requires a vocational assessment, plus an economist to quantify.
New Jersey residents living with a brain injury may also qualify for support through the state's Traumatic Brain Injury Fund, which purchases therapies, assistive technology, and service coordination as a payer of last resort. It is worth knowing about while a claim is pending, and we raise it with families who may be eligible.
What New Jersey Law Requires You to Prove
A brain injury claim in New Jersey requires the same four elements as any negligence case: a duty owed to you, a breach of that duty, a causal link between the breach and your injury, and damages. Causation is where brain injury cases are won and lost.
Two rules of New Jersey law deserve particular mention. Under N.J.S.A. 2A:14-2 you generally have two years from the date of injury to file suit, and that clock does not pause while you wait to see whether cognitive symptoms resolve. Claims involving a public entity carry a much shorter notice requirement, generally 90 days under the New Jersey Tort Claims Act.
Second, N.J.S.A. 2A:15-5.1 permits recovery even when you were partly at fault, provided your share is not greater than that of the parties you are claiming against, with the award reduced by your percentage.
New Jersey also follows the principle that a defendant is accountable for aggravating a pre-existing condition. That matters here because a history of concussion is one of the first things the other side will look for.
Brain injuries that prove fatal shift the analysis again, and when a brain injury results in wrongful death in New Jersey, the claim moves to the estate and the family.
Why Work With Our TBI Lawyers in New Jersey
Head injury cases reward firms that take the medicine seriously, and that is where we put our effort.
- Insight from the defense side. More than 10 years at two large national firms taught our founder how brain injury claims get evaluated and discounted, so we prepare the answers before the arguments arrive.
- Medical depth. We work with neuropsychologists, treating neurologists, rehabilitation physicians, and life care planners as standard practice on serious head injuries.
- Your attorney on the phone. Richard handles the day-to-day building of these cases personally.
- Both benefit systems. When the injury happened at work, we pursue New Jersey workers' compensation alongside the third-party claim.
- Related catastrophic experience. We handle severe injury claims across New Jersey, including New Jersey burn injury and catastrophic accident claims, and clients in Hudson County can reach our catastrophic injury attorney in Jersey City coverage area.
- No cost to begin. Consultations are free, we are reachable around the clock, and we work on contingency.
We will not promise an outcome, because nobody honestly can. We will tell you what we think your case needs and whether we are the right firm to build it. Call (201) 289-8614 and let's find out.
FAQs Answered by Our New Jersey Brain Injury Lawyer
Here are the questions families ask us most often about brain injury claims, beyond what is covered above.
My CT scan was normal. Do I still have a case?
Very possibly, yes. A CT scan is designed to rule out bleeding and fractures that need immediate intervention, and a normal result tells you almost nothing about the microscopic damage behind persistent symptoms. Neuropsychological testing and treating-physician opinion carry far more weight on that question.
How soon after a head injury should symptoms be documented?
As soon as you notice them, ideally with your own doctor and in writing. Symptoms that emerge days later are medically ordinary but they invite argument, and a contemporaneous record answers it. Keeping a simple daily note about headaches, sleep, memory lapses, and mood is genuinely useful evidence later.
Can a child's brain injury be evaluated the same way?
No, and this is one of the most commonly mishandled parts of these cases. An injury to a developing brain can affect skills that have not emerged yet, so the full picture may not be visible for years. New Jersey pauses the filing deadline for minors, which allows time for pediatric neuropsychological follow-up before a case is valued.
What if my employer says my concussion was not serious enough to report?
Report it anyway, in writing, and seek medical evaluation. Workers' compensation has its own notice requirements, and an unreported head injury becomes much harder to establish months later when symptoms have not resolved. We can help you sort out what you are entitled to.
Will the other side get access to my medical history?
In litigation, records relevant to the claimed injury are generally discoverable, which includes prior head injuries and, often, mental health treatment. We work to keep that scope reasonable and tied to the injury rather than open-ended. Being upfront with us about your history early is always better than having it surface later.
How does a brain injury affect the value of a case?
Documented cognitive impairment tends to increase value substantially, because it affects earning capacity and daily function over a lifetime rather than for a healing period. The word "documented" is doing the work in that sentence. An undocumented brain injury often adds nothing at all to a claim.
Who else in my life should be involved in the case?
Whoever sees you most, usually a spouse, parent, adult child, or close colleague. Their observations about specific changes carry real weight, and their presence at meetings helps because information is harder to retain after a head injury. We encourage families to come along.
Talk to a New Jersey Brain Injury Attorney Today
A brain injury deserves a case built on real medical evidence, developed by people who understand what the records do and do not show. That is work we know how to do.
Call Reinartz Law Firm at (201) 289-8614 for a free consultation at any hour, or reach out through our contact page. Our office is at Court Plaza South, West Wing, 21 Main St., Suite 205, Hackensack, NJ 07601, and we represent injured people throughout Bergen County and across New Jersey.
Bring your records and bring someone who knows you. We will tell you honestly what we see.
The Reinartz Law Firm - Hackensack Office
Court Plaza South - West Wing
21 Main St Suite 205,
Hackensack, NJ 07601
