Your newborn should be wrapping a tiny fist around your finger. Instead, one little arm lies still against their side. It does not curl, reach, or move as the other arm does. Why doesn’t this arm work? It’s not broken.
It could be a brachial plexus injury doing this to your baby. The cluster of nerves that carries every signal from the spine to the shoulder, arm, and hand could have been damaged during delivery. If so, your child’s future can seem uncertain in a way no parent is ever ready for.
If this is your situation, you need answers. A Louisville brachial plexus injury lawyer at Thomas Law Offices can help you figure out what happened in the delivery room and, most importantly, whether it should have been prevented. Whatever the cause, we pursue the full, long-term compensation that a catastrophic birth injury demands. We work on contingency, meaning there are no fees or upfront costs unless we recover for you. These claims can be time-sensitive. The sooner we begin, the better.
Chances are you’d never heard of the brachial plexus until a doctor mentioned it in connection with your baby.
The brachial plexus is the network of nerves running from the spinal cord, through the neck and shoulder, and down the arm into the hand. It regulates movement and sensation in the upper limb, which is why damage to it can be devastating and difficult to fix.
Brachial plexus injuries are not all the same, and the differences could matter a lot to your child’s prognosis and your case. On the milder end is neuropraxia, a stretched nerve that often heals on its own over time. More serious are ruptures, where the nerve is torn, and avulsions, where the nerve has been yanked clean off the spinal cord. An avulsion is the most severe form and is typically permanent.
The severity of the injury determines what treatment your child will need and how far into the future those needs will reach. The more severe the injury, the more permanent the damage, and the more your claim must account for.
When a birth injury is the result of a medical provider’s negligence, Kentucky law gives your family the right to seek compensation through a medical malpractice claim.
Understanding what kind of injury your child suffered and how it happened is the first step toward recovering the costs you are owed.
What does it take to injure a baby’s brachial plexus during birth? Usually, it’s excessive force on the baby’s head and neck as the child is guided through the birth canal. The most common scenario is a complication called shoulder dystocia. The baby’s shoulder becomes lodged behind the mother’s pelvic bone during delivery.
As the doctor works to free the baby, pulling too hard or at the wrong angle can stretch or tear those delicate nerves.
Certain pregnancies carry a higher risk. A careful medical team is supposed to see them coming.
Risk factors include:
Here’s the hard truth at the center of many of these cases: shoulder dystocia is a known, anticipated emergency, and there are established maneuvers to manage it safely.
When a doctor ignores the warning signs, applies too much force, or fails to order a timely C-section, a preventable injury becomes a permanent one. The same delivery-room failures can cause other birth injuries, too, including cerebral palsy. The line between unavoidable complication and Kentucky medical malpractice is where a careful investigation begins.
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In a newborn, a brachial plexus injury doesn’t come with any visible wounds or trauma.
The damage is internal, so signs can be easy to miss in the first hours and days. What parents and especially trained nurses will notice, however, are the following:
Any or all of these signs can point to a problem. The specific condition depends on which nerves have been damaged.
Erb’s palsy, the most common brachial plexus injury in newborns, affects the upper nerves that control the shoulder and upper arm.
Klumpke’s palsy affects the lower nerves that control the hand and wrist.
A global, or total injury, affects the entire arm. This is the most severe injury.
These situations are not hopeless. In fact, many babies with Erb’s palsy improve. With early physical therapy and time, 70 to 90 percent of newborns recover much of their functions within the first few months. Babies born with Klumpke’s palsy don’t always recover so quickly.
For them, more medical attention could be necessary. However, a newborn with a rupture or avulsion injury cannot heal without surgery. The clearest sign of a rupture or avulsion is a limp, completely unresponsive arm.
The sooner the specific injury is identified, documented, and treated, the stronger your case and the more optimistic your child’s outlook will be.
It takes diligent investigative work to trace a birth injury back to a preventable mistake.
The central question in these cases is whether the doctor and the delivery team met the accepted standard of care. In other words, did the delivery team follow protocols that any competent provider should have followed in the same situation?
Getting to that answer means collecting and scrutinizing the evidence: the prenatal records, the fetal monitoring strips, the delivery notes, and the timeline of decisions made in the room.
We work with obstetricians, specialists, and other medical experts to determine:
A successful birth injury claim hinges on connecting that breakdown in care to your child’s injury, using irrefutable evidence.
One peculiarity of medical malpractice matters is that the records you need for evidence are being held by the same people you’re filing suit against. This is why it takes a Louisville catastrophic injury lawyer’s subpoena to get the records and bring in the qualified experts.
As brachial plexus injury attorneys serving Kentucky, our job is to:
The goal isn’t to just assign blame. It’s about securing whatever your child’s care will need for as long as they need it, even if it’s for their lifetime.
There is no single “average.” Settlement value depends heavily on the severity of the nerve damage and how much it will affect your child’s life over time. Cases involving a complete avulsion or permanent paralysis generally warrant significantly more because they carry a lifetime of medical care, therapy, and lost earning capacity. The honest answer is that the claim is worth what your child’s specific losses—current and future—add up to.
Not every difficult birth involves malpractice. But when an injury results from a provider ignoring the warning signs of shoulder dystocia, using excessive force, or failing to order a timely C-section, it may have been preventable. The way to know is to have the delivery records and fetal monitoring strips reviewed by medical experts. That review is exactly what we arrange.
It depends on how badly the nerves were damaged. A mild stretch injury, called neuropraxia, often improves over weeks or months with therapy, and many babies regain much of their function. But a ruptured or avulsed nerve usually will not recover without surgery, and even then, the function regained may be partial. Timing matters, too—treatment tends to be most effective early, which is one more reason not to wait to have your child evaluated.
As soon as you are able. Birth injury claims are time-sensitive both medically and legally: early treatment can shape your child’s recovery, and early legal action lets us preserve the delivery records and evidence while everything is still fresh. Waiting can quietly cost your family, so it is worth speaking with an attorney promptly.
A claim can account for far more than current medical bills. It may include future surgeries and therapy, assistive devices, home and vehicle adaptations, special education, your child’s lost future earning capacity, and the pain and diminished quality of life the injury causes. The goal is a recovery measured against your child’s whole life, not just the bills in front of you today.
The biggest mistake a family can make is to settle for whatever amount the injury costs today. For a child, today is only the beginning. Costs can stretch across an entire lifetime.
Treatment alone can come with a staggering bill. Severe nerve injuries often call for microsurgery, such as nerve grafts and nerve transfers. Sometimes, tendons must be moved around to restore lost function. This is why brachial plexus surgery costs can run so high.
Months and years of physical and occupational therapy usually follow, woven through a whole childhood of growth and development. Even after all of it, recovery could be only partial. This is why, when we put a dollar value on a claim, we look far beyond the first surgery to account for:
Getting nerve damage compensation in Louisville means projecting all of these costs across decades. We take a careful, long-view approach with every case as a Louisville catastrophic injury lawyer. Any amount that covers this year’s costs but ignores the next sixty is not a settlement.
It’s a shortfall your child could get stuck with.
Louisville happens to be a national hub for hand and peripheral-nerve care, and that matters more than you might think.
The pioneering microsurgery was done at the Kleinert Kutz Hand Care Center and the University of Louisville. This is where surgeons performed this nation’s first hand transplant, and that means some of the world’s leading nerve-repair expertise is local.
Also, University of Louisville-affiliated Norton Children’s Hospital puts many of the state’s top pediatric specialists close to home. When your child’s case can turn on exactly which nerves were damaged and what it will take to repair them, that double-barreled medical depth is a real advantage.
It’s also why this kind of case belongs with a law firm that understands nerve injuries.
These claims are expensive to build, and hospitals and their insurers know it. They treat catastrophic birth injury cases as wars of attrition. They try to wear down your finances and your resolve so that your exhausted family will settle for far less than the child deserves.
We don’t let them.
Thomas Law Offices is based right here in Louisville, and we handle serious injury cases nationwide, which means we can match these big insurance companies. We work with the experts to conduct the investigations a birth injury case requires. You can learn more about our broader Louisville birth injury and medical malpractice work to see how we handle these complex claims.
When you’re ready, reach out. There will be no pressure, only a clear-eyed look at what happened and what your family could recover.
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