In the world of personal injury law, there are all kinds of experts that you may need to provide expert testimony about your case. But one kind of expert that is often overlooked, is the biomechanical expert.
The biomechanical expert bridges the gap between your accident, and your injuries, showing the jury how your body may have been affected, by the forces and the impact that you suffered in your accident.
When Do You Need a Biomechanical Expert?
Let’s say that a heavy object falls on you from a high shelf in a store. You suffer a bad head and neck injury. Can the forces of an object falling on your head, actually cause the injuries that you sustained?
Your doctor technically isn’t qualified to give that information—he or she can testify about your medical condition, how injured you are, or your future prognosis, but your doctor is not a legal expert in how a force that falls from above can impact the structures of the head and neck.
For that kind of testimony, you need a biomechanical expert.
The biomechanical expert explains to a jury that when the body moves a certain way, sustains certain forces, twists in a given manner, or is subjected to inertia, that the body will respond (that is, become injured) in a given way. The biotechnical expert can testify as to what kind of force or impact is so strong that the structures of the body just give way, yielding injuries.
A biomechanical expert isn’t always needed. In some cases, causation—that is, the connection between the accident and your injuries—is obvious. It is obvious that a rear-end accident can yield a neck sprain or strain; you do not need an expert to say that when you are hit from behind, the ligaments and tendons in the neck can tear.
Use in Fall Cases
But cases involving falls often do utilize biomechanical experts, because falls are so different from each other. One person may fall without bracing themselves, another may have a wrist break their fall, another may fall on his or her head, and yet another may find the entire force of the fall is sustained by an elbow.
What the body does, and how it moves, affects what parts of the body are impacted in a fall. A biomechanical expert can testify that a given injury will naturally happen, when the body falls in a certain way.
How much force is needed to break an ankle? What kind of twisting motion can damage ligaments? How much weight can your knee ligaments sustain? These are all questions that experts can answer.
By taking the jury through the analysis of the systems of the body and the forces they can and cannot sustain, the biomechanical expert can go a long way towards convincing the jury that your injuries were caused by the forces sustained in your accident.
