Personal Injury Aspect of NFL Lawsuit – Aronberg & Aronberg

 

Personal injury law is not, despite popular belief, confined to the airwaves of commercial advertisements.  P.I. law has real-life applicability and plays an increasingly present role in a wide variety of circumstances.  Personal injury issues arise all over the place: from pre-K to nursing homes and from roadways to football fields.   Understanding the underlying issues of the myriad of circumstances, as well as their presence in the courts, will enable you to be better protected should you ever find yourself in a personal injury mess.

As you may have heard, a unified lawsuit was filed against the NFL in federal court in Philadelphia, on behalf of more than 2,000 National Football League (NFL) players.  The mega-lawsuit combines more than 80 similar cases, all of which allege that the NFL neglected to recognize and address the severe, neurological risks associated with playing football.  Additionally, the suit alleges that the league subsequently neglected to tell players about the potential risks that they faced.

To understand the alleged negligence of the NFL, consider the following example.  Imagine that there was a coal mining company that went out hiring workers to spend their days in caves, mining coal.  Coal mining can be incredibly dangerous—and, because of that, the coal mining company had a duty to inform the potential workers of the risks that they faced during their workday.  Furthermore, imagine that the coal mining company didn’t just fail to warn the workers about the risks, they went so far as to completely disregard the proven, documented dangers of a coal miners’ work!  That’s what the NFL has on its hands: a lawsuit alleging that they didn’t acknowledge the proven dangers associate with football and they failed to warn the players about the risks they face.

What happens on a football field that’s so dangerous?  Concussions—concussions that lead to permanent mental injuries that often result in depression, dementia and suicide. Concussions are not little incidents that happen on a little league soccer field.  Concussions are serious brain injuries that have been occurring for a long time on football fields, among other places.  People often assume that because the brain is protected by a skull, and then protected by a helmet, that it’s safe.  It’s not! When one helmet hits another, the helmets stop, as do the skulls, but the brains just knock back and forth against the front and back of the skull.  This unfortunate movement is known as inertia, which can be easily understood as the fact that an object in motion tends to stay in motion.  The brain injuries caused by concussions on a football field are similar to those in a car accident.  If you’re hit from behind, and you jerk forward and backward, when your body comes to a permanent halt, your brain does not.  It will continue to smash against the front and back of your skull until it comes to a final rest on its own.

The brain injuries in football are highly publicized due to the fanfare associated with the sport.  The catastrophic results of the injuries, however, are all-too familiar in the world of personal injury law.

For more information on brain injuries, or any other personal injury issue, contact the experienced attorneys at The Law Offices of Aronberg & Aronberg by calling 561-266-9191 or emailing daronberg@build.simple.biz.

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