Personal Injury: Reconstructing the Collision the Jury Could Not See

The plaintiff, referred to here as B.H., was a working father of two young children. A collision caused by another driver left him with multiple fractures and a traumatic brain injury. He did not return to work. He used a wheelchair. The medical bills accumulated while the household income did not.

Damages of that severity are, paradoxically, not the hard part of a case like this. Liability was. The defense disputed how the collision occurred and therefore who was responsible for it, and without an answer to that question the extent of B.H.’s injuries was legally beside the point.

Plaintiff’s counsel, who had worked with the firm before, asked for an accident reconstruction expert.

This is a matter where Dr. Alban was not the testifying expert, and it is worth being explicit about that, because it illustrates how the practice actually works. Accident reconstruction is its own discipline with its own qualifications. An emergency physician is not a reconstruction engineer, and an expert who testifies outside their qualifications is an expert who gets excluded.

What Themis provided was the identification, vetting, and management of a reconstruction specialist with more than a decade of experience analysing collisions and a testimony history that would withstand scrutiny on voir dire. Dr. Alban stayed involved through report review and trial preparation, where his own reading of the injury record was directly relevant: the pattern of B.H.’s injuries was itself evidence about the forces involved, and it had to be consistent with the reconstruction rather than merely adjacent to it.

Reconstruction works backward from physical evidence to the event that produced it. Vehicle damage, resting positions, roadway evidence, sight lines, and the injuries themselves all constrain what can have happened. Most of those constraints are unavailable to a jury not because they are hidden but because they are unreadable — a crush profile means nothing to someone who has never been taught to read one.

The work reconstructed the sequence leading to impact: positions, speeds, the point at which each driver could have perceived the other, and what each could have done in the time available. The output was not an assertion about fault. It was a physical account of the event, from which the fault conclusion followed.

The reconstruction expert’s job at trial was translation. A jury does not need to understand momentum transfer; it needs to understand what the defendant could see, when he could see it, and what he did. Testimony that stays technical loses the room. Testimony that oversimplifies gets dismantled on cross. The useful version stays accurate while remaining followable, and it holds up when opposing counsel probes the assumptions underneath it.

The consistency between the reconstruction and the medical record mattered here too. Where the physical account of the collision and the clinical account of the injuries corroborate each other, the combination is considerably harder to attack than either alone — and inconsistency between two of a party’s own experts is one of the cheapest wins available to the other side.

The jury returned a unanimous verdict holding the other driver responsible, and B.H. was compensated.

The lesson is not that reconstruction wins cases. It is that a contested liability question is usually a question about physical evidence that nobody in the courtroom can read without help. The party that supplies that help competently — and early enough for it to shape discovery rather than merely survive it — is generally the party the evidence ends up favouring.