The Team Around the Client Magazine

No family facing brain injury should feel alone on their journey. This edition of the Team Around the Client magazine focusses on how RWK Goodman strives to walk alongside families as trusted legal allies and advocates. By integrating best practices from multiple disciplines united by a commitment to empower families after ABI, it enables us to champion family needs on a broader stage and contribute to meaningful change.

The Ahead Together conference, co-created by RWK Goodman and Dr Audrey Daisley, brings together family members and brain injury professionals to explore the relational, clinical, and legal dimensions of brain injury alongside the latest research. It remains the only conference dedicated solely to the family experience of brain injury; contributions from family members with lived experience amplifies their voice.  

This year’s conference focussed on the subject of ‘Reclaiming Hope’ for families after ABI, a theme inspired by John Keen, the father of my brain injured client. In opening the first Ahead Together conference in 2019, John spoke of the juxtapositions of hope and hopelessness in his family’s navigation of life after brain injury. Speaking at the fourth Ahead Together conference, John eloquently described hope as a ‘gift’.

Chiltern Music Therapy was one of the sponsors of the conference. In the first article, Elizabeth Nightingale writes passionately about how neurologic music therapy helps individuals and families reconnect through music by fostering joy, identity, and purpose.

The importance of recognising the ripple effect of ABI on the family is emphasised by my colleague, Rosie Hodgetts, in her article exploring the legal complexities of bringing secondary victim claims and calling for the inclusion of family therapy costs in personal injury and clinical negligence actions.

A competitive poster exhibition (shortlisted to 10 entrants by joint Judges Dr Preston and Professor Whiffin) highlighted family-centred work, including the wining study on siblings of children with acquired brain injury, revealing psychological impacts and unmet needs within families. Dr Preston comments in her article at page three that the posters reflect ‘an understanding of rehabilitation that acknowledges the relational dimensions of adjustment and reinforces the importance of keeping hope, while at times complex and non-linear, central to conversations in neurorehabilitation’. Indeed, a reflection of the insights expressed by the sibling co-chairs at the conference.  

The joint article of Drs Daisley and Parker at page four considers the impact of expert assessments from a family-focused lens and, drawing on their complementary roles as treating clinical neuropsychologist and expert witness, they make some excellent suggestions for best practice for experts, treating clinicians and lawyers alike.  

When Dr Audrey Daisley and I founded the conference in 2019, it began with a simple but powerful vision for services that understood and supported whole families, not just individuals. The theme of the fourth conference of ‘Reclaiming Hope’ had a dual purpose; for families, it was about finding renewed possibilities despite the challenges of brain injury, and for professionals, reclaiming a collective hope that systemic change is possible: “hope is hard to hold onto; that’s why we hold it together”.

In her erudite Review of the conference, Dr Jessica Fish comments ‘I think we can safely say that Ahead Together is not only a conference but a community united in its interest in supporting families affected by brain injury…… 

The Ahead Together community and its flagship events are key drivers of the transformation of the way families are being considered and involved in rehabilitation and beyond that in life after brain injury’.

I hope this collection of articles from experts working with families after brain injury inspires you to join our Ahead Together community.

Tracy Norris-Evans, Partner, Head of Injury Division, and Guest Editor of this Edition of the Team Around the Client Magazine.

Many of us appreciate how important family can be and it is something we sometimes take for granted. We trust that our family will be there to celebrate our success, comfort us when we need it and provide us with stability and guidance. However, when someone suffers a catastrophic injury, the impact can ripple through the entire family and change the relationship dynamic. Rosie Hodgetts investigates how litigation can help families.

When a family member sustains a brain injury, the litigation process that may follow can be highly complex and emotionally demanding for their family, at a time when they may already be carrying the impact of loss, uncertain futures, and care responsibilities. In this joint article, Dr Gaby Parker and Dr Audrey Daisley consider the value that might be added by focusing on the impact on family.