Tom Davis

In May of 2021, the 19-year-old Plaintiff was driving home on the highway and slowed down to wait for traffic and turn left to get to her house. The 19-year-old Defendant was driving his Ford F-150 pickup truck, not paying attention, and rear-ended her, causing significant property damage and the Plaintiff to suffer a brain bleed and have to be life-flighted to a trauma ER, where she was treated and released the next day. For the next four years, Plaintiff went to over a hundred medical visits for various TBI symptoms that her primary care and counseling providers attributed to other causes, before Plaintiff was eventually seen by a neurologist and a concussion specialist who properly diagnosed her with post-concussion syndrome and TBI. Plaintiff filed suit in Atchison County, Kansas, against Defendant, where both parties were lifelong residents. The case was litigated for three years, leading up to a three-day trial in February of 2026. The jury deliberated for three hours before awarding Plaintiff $50,000 in past medical, $200,000 in future medical, $250,000 in past non-economic, and $300,000 in future economic. The last offer a week before trial was $350,000.

Teaching points:

1. Jury selection was challenging as a lot of panel members knew or knew of either or both parties, and had strong opinions about lawyers from out of town asking them to award substantial amounts of money against an individual resident defendant, who came from a prominent local farming family. Plaintiff’s counsel took on the role of teacher and educator, leaning hard into the purpose of voir dire and the civil jury system, and ended up with a decent jury who tried hard to set aside any biases and decide the case based on the evidence and law.
2. Plaintiff had pre-existing mental health problems that clearly played a role in her post-MVA symptoms and treatment. Plaintiff embraced the Kansas Aggravation of Injury instruction at trial and explained to the jury how people with pre-existing conditions were still protected by the law. Plaintiff would rather have had her health back, and it was not her fault that the collision aggravated her prior issues. Family and friends testified as health witnesses and did a good job of explaining how Plaintiff became a different person after the crash.
3. Plaintiff was also high-functioning and got her L.P.N. and then her R.N. in Nursing in the years after the crash, and the jury cited this as the primary reason for not giving a higher verdict. Plaintiff also embraced Plaintiff’s ambitions and how hard she worked to overcome the challenges of her brain injury, but also told the jury about how hard Plaintiff struggled in school and failed several tests before ultimately getting her degrees and achieving these career goals. We did the best we could at trial to deal with this issue, but it obviously played a role in the jury’s ultimate verdict.
4. The Defense produced social media and vacation photos of Plaintiff traveling and going to concerts and enjoying her life, and Plaintiff pre-empted this early in the case by using these outings as examples of how Abbie tried hard to live a normal life but would get reminders all the time about the limits caused by her brain injury, including one trip she took to Arkansas three years after the crash when she dove into water and ended up in the ER with severe headaches.
5. There were a lot of medical records, and the Defense cherry-picked visits where Plaintiff was feeling well, or doctors stated she was recovering. Plaintiff utilized several different medical summaries and highlighted excerpts from her medical records to show the jury how isolated medical visits or good days she was having were not indicative of her brain injury, and they needed to step back and look at the whole picture to understand her brain injury and how it was affecting her overall condition and medical treatment and how it resulted from the May 2021 car wreck.
6. The case was aggressively defended at trial, and the Defense tried to throw everything possible at the jury to distract them and make them think the plaintiff was a liar and was making up the whole thing. Plaintiff refused to take the bait, rose above the Defense’s nonsense and leaned into the Kansas jury instruction about how arguments of counsel do not equal evidence, and reiterated to the jury how key pieces of evidence confirmed the Plaintiff’s ongoing TBI and post-concussion symptoms and how they related to the May 2021 car wreck, to contract that with arguments made by defense counsel on the fly at trial to try and get the jury to ignore the clear weight of the evidence.