What is a Catastrophic Injury & When Can You File a Lawsuit?

Cassidy Loutos
Feb 5
4 min read

You’ve likely heard of basic negligence cases such as slip and fall lawsuits, medical malpractice lawsuits, and similar cases, but when the consequences of such negligence are particularly serious, they often become catastrophic injury cases.

Today, we’re going to go over what a catastrophic injury is and what requirements need to be met to file a catastrophic injury claim.

What is a Catastrophic Injury?

With a lot of personal injury cases, the injury is serious, but it’s not something that permanently damages your quality of life. A broken leg might require large medical bills, lost wages, and similar costs, but you’ll eventually recover.

With a catastrophic injury, you don’t. At least, you don’t fully recover.

A catastrophic injury results in severe physical or cognitive harm that leaves you permanently disabled.

A few good examples would be a work-related injury that requires your legs to be amputated, a slip and fall that causes traumatic brain injury and cognitive impairment, becoming paralyzed after a car accident, etc.

Filing a Catastrophic Injury Case is More Complicated Than It Seems

You’d think that a catastrophic injury case would be one of the easiest lawsuits to file. After all, you have serious permanent damage that is supposedly someone’s fault.

That’s where things get complicated, though. You have to actually prove someone else is at fault, and you have to prove how much fault they’re responsible for.

We’ll break this down step by step.

1. Proving the Injury Happened Due to the Incident

This isn’t a problem in most catastrophic injury cases. If you suffer an injury that causes serious life-long impairment, you’ll be rushed to a hospital immediately, and everything will be recorded.

However, you still have to have that documentation to prove to the court that you sustained the injury on someone else’s property or because the other person was involved in the event.

This is more of an issue with standard negligence cases, where people will sometimes delay care until symptoms show up long after the event occurs. That’s a lot less likely with a catastrophic injury.

2. Proving Duty of Care

Another key factor is called the duty of care. This means that you have to prove that the person you’re suing had a responsibility to ensure your safety in the first place.

If you slip and fall on a public sidewalk because there’s a rain puddle, you can’t sue the last person to walk by it because they didn’t warn you. They are not responsible for you or the public space you were in during the incident.

However, when you go into a store, you can reasonably expect the store owner to provide a safe place for customers. You also expect other drivers to follow the law, homeowners to ensure safety on their property, etc.

3. Proving Negligence

Next, you have to prove that someone failed their duty of care. If they did everything right, and you still failed, you likely don’t have a case. However, if they failed to do something, they have been negligent, and that gives you a clear reason to sue.

Let’s use a grocery store for an example.

In one event, you go to the store, and they use the top shelf for overstocking. There are no signs telling you customers are banned from the top shelf, and an employee left a stepladder nearby when they ran off to handle another task.

The ladder does not have a detachable Employees Only guard. You can reasonably assume that the ladder is there to access products. Unfortunately, you slip on the ladder and suffer a serious spinal injury.

There’s a good case for a catastrophic injury lawsuit in that example. None of the standard signage was used, equipment was left unsupervised and in a location that insinuated it could be used, and products on the top shelf looked like they were normally stocked and accessible.

In another event, imagine that the store does have a sign saying that customers are required to ask for assistance, and the ladder has a chain closing off access to the steps with an Employees Only sign attached. The ladder is also tucked away.

You ignore both signs, move the ladder to where you need it, unlatch the chain that clearly states you’re not allowed to use it, and then you suffer your injury. It’s easy to argue that the store did its part to care about your safety. You actively worked against the store in this case and caused the injury.

4. Determining the Amount of Fault

This is where things get a lot more complicated, and there is a lot of grey area that can impact your lawsuit.

Not only do you have to prove there was negligence, but you have to determine how much of the negligence came from the other party. How responsible are they for the accident?

We can use the same example we used in the previous section.

In the first example, where no signs were used, the store might still be able to prove you are partially responsible for doing things outside of the norm. While they would still likely take most of the fault, they might be able to reduce the amount of compensation owed.

In the second example, where the company clearly did its best to prevent the problem, you could still argue they were partially to blame because no one was around to help or because no one was monitoring the equipment. It’s far less likely that you’ll win, but it is a possibility.

Optimally, you’ll file a lawsuit when you can prove that the defendant is mostly to blame for the incident.

Consult a Top-Tier Catastrophic Injury Lawyer

There is a lot of grey area in many catastrophic injury cases, and even when it’s clearly the other person’s fault, if they have a good legal team, they can make arguments that cost you much-deserved compensation.

If you think you have a catastrophic injury case, Loutos Law PLLC can help!