Providing Compassionate Guidance in Your Family’s Fight for Justice
Serious injuries are terrible for any person or family to endure. When they happen to children, they become almost unbearable.
GRL Law has years of experience navigating children’s injury claims in Iowa courts. We’ve achieved some of Iowa’s top verdicts for families, helping them on their road to recovery. See how our attorneys can assist you during these difficult times.
Why Personal Injury Cases Involving Children Are Unique
Any family that has to suffer from the loss or injury to a child understands that no amount of monetary compensation can undo the years of pain and suffering that result.
Compounding the difficulty is that when children are injured due to recklessness, negligence, or someone else’s intentional acts, the situations come with unique legal and medical considerations.
These include:
• Different legal rules and deadlines
• Complex medical and developmental considerations
• Special claims for parents and family members
Contact GRL Law to get expert help deciphering these unique rules so that your family can find justice in your unique situation.
Navigating Children’s Injury Claims: A Guide
Understanding the Legal Process, Deadlines & Conservatorships
A minor is considered legally incompetent to sue or be sued. A child must wait until they turn 18 to file a claim on their own. Children’s injury claims also have a statute of limitations of one year after the child’s 18th birthday.
If the injured child is young or if the parents do not believe it is in their best interest to wait, there are alternative options. A lawsuit may be brought by the parent, guardian, or a court-appointed conservator on the child’s behalf.
There are two ways to do so:
"Next Friend" Claims
Before a child turns 18, a child’s parent or guardian can make a claim as “Next Friend.” This legal term refers to a person who appears in a lawsuit on behalf of an incompetent or minor plaintiff but who is not a party to the lawsuit in that capacity.
Conservatorships
A second option is to set up a conservatorship on behalf of the minor child and have the court appoint a conservator whose sole responsibility is to ensure that the child’s best interest is taken into consideration during the litigation or claim process.
Iowa law requires that a conservatorship be established anytime a child is to receive more than $50,000. Depending on the situation, a parent, close relative, attorney, or completely independent individual may be appointed as the conservator.
It is important to recognize and understand that in these situations where a child is seriously injured, the injury lawyer’s obligation and duty is to the child; it is to ensure that the child’s financial and medical needs are first and foremost. When a conservatorship is created, the ultimate last word is with the court. The court must approve any and all settlements and disbursements, including any attorney fee agreements or other disbursements from the conservatorship. It is also the court’s responsibility to ensure that the best interest of the injured child is met.
Parental Claims & Damages
Parents can also make a claim for their own personal losses when their child is killed or injured in Iowa. These types of claims are commonly referred to as “loss of consortium, services, and support,” or sometimes simply “consortium” claims.
If a child is killed, these claims typically are made along with the underlying estate’s claim in a wrongful death action, unless it is not feasible to do so for some reason.
Parental consortium refers to a parent’s loss of the intangible benefits of the parent-child relationship, such as companionship, cooperation, aid, and affection. Like pain and suffering, there is no mathematical formula to calculate these losses. However, these losses are valued significantly by Iowa juries and can and have led to very substantial verdicts. In fact, GRL law has obtained three of the five highest ever reported verdicts for adult-child consortium claims in Iowa.
Parents are also entitled to the economic value of the loss of the child’s services, which includes both the amount the child could have earned outside the home, as well as the value of the child’s labor inside the home. Additionally, parents are entitled to compensation for medical bills and burial expenses as well, if they incur those expenses.
Medical & Special Considerations
The younger a child is when they suffer a serious injury, the more difficult and complicated a claim for damages can become. The vast majority of a child’s cognitive development occurs within the earliest years of their life, and even the most seemingly insignificant interference with this development can have a lasting impact.
Serious injuries will often have a negative impact on the child’s development that may not be readily apparent to the untrained eye:
- Physical injuries to the bones and joints of a child can adversely impact growth plates and slow or hinder physical development.
- Injuries, both mental and physical, to the brain and cognitive functions will likewise slow or inhibit the child’s mental developmental progress, sometimes to a point of permanent disability.
While some serious injuries to children have open and obvious long-term consequences, others are not always so readily apparent. In these situations, the lack of a well-defined baseline for comparison, of before- and after-accident abilities, complicates claims made on behalf of seriously injured children.
For this reason, medical and psychological expertise is necessary to not only document and treat the specific injuries but also to be able to explain to insurance companies, and ultimately juries, what the child’s future will be like as a result of the injury.
Many times with these injuries, only time will tell what the future prognosis will be. Patience and thorough evaluation by qualified medical and legal professionals is the only way to go when dealing with serious injuries to children. You deserve a thorough workup of the case, and more importantly, your child deserves it. As a result, a quick settlement for serious injuries to children is hardly ever advisable, unless it involves the insurance company settling a claim for the limits of a policy.
