Catastrophic Injuries
After a catastrophic injury, your hospital chart will likely list a diagnosis and treatment plan. What it will not capture is what that diagnosis means for your ability to work, parent, or simply get through an ordinary day years later. A Eugene catastrophic injury lawyer can help account for that gap between the medical record and how the injury affects your life.
At Parke Gordon Law, we represent people whose injuries have permanently changed their lives. Our trusted personal injury attorneys can build your case around the full scope of what you have lost medically, financially, and personally, rather than treating it as a routine claim based only on the amount of damages.
What Makes an Injury Catastrophic?
Not every serious injury reaches the level that courts and insurers treat as catastrophic. While there is no standard legal definition, courts and insurers generally regard injuries as catastrophic when they are severe and long-lasting or permanent. Injuries that consistently fall into this category include:
If you suffer a catastrophic injury in Eugene, our attorneys can assist with a claim arising from a high-speed car accident, semi-truck collision, motorcycle crash, or serious fall. Accurately valuing this type of claim often takes longer than valuing a standard injury claim because the full medical trajectory can take months or longer to become clear.
How Does the Law Divide Fault When Multiple Parties Cause Your Injury?
Catastrophic accidents frequently involve more than one responsible party, such as a distracted truck driver whose employer also failed to maintain the vehicle or a property owner who ignored a hazard that a contractor installed unsafely. When several parties contribute to your injury, the law requires an individual assessment of each party’s fault and also accounts for any fault you may bear.
Under O.R.S. § 31.600, you can recover damages as long as your own fault does not exceed the combined fault of everyone else involved, including every responsible defendant. In practice, if you bear 49 percent of the fault, you can still recover a reduced amount, while if you bear 51 percent or more, you cannot recover damages. When several defendants share responsibility, each typically carries an individual percentage of fault, and the total fault among every party adds up to 100 percent. Our lawyers can assess how fault assigned to multiple defendants affects the value of your claim when you suffer a life-altering injury in Eugene.
One additional detail concerns non-economic damages, meaning compensation for pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life. The Oregon Supreme Court struck down a cap on non-economic damages as unconstitutional in 2020. For a claim against a private driver, company, or property owner, the law currently imposes no statutory ceiling on this category of damages. That can come into effect when an injury causes substantial non-economic harm in addition to medical expenses.
