Louisville Cerebral Palsy Lawyers

Cerebral palsy care in Louisville

The Norton Children’s Cerebral Palsy Clinic brings neonatologists, child neurologists, physical therapists, pediatric neurosurgeons and pediatric orthopedists into one assessment. Treatment runs from braces, muscle relaxing medicine and serial casting to orthopedic surgery for tight tendons. For spasticity that oral medicine does not control, a neurosurgeon can implant a baclofen pump, and some children are candidates for selective dorsal rhizotomy. Appointments are at (502) 588-3650.

Families outside Louisville do not always have to make the drive. The clinic’s team sees children at outreach sites in Bowling Green, Campbellsville, Corbin, Elizabethtown, Frankfort, Owensboro and Paducah, and across the river in Evansville, Indiana.

UofL Health’s Frazier Rehab Institute lists its pediatric therapy at the Kosair for Kids Pediatric Center on the Mary & Elizabeth Hospital campus in south Louisville. Physical, occupational and speech therapists there treat children from infancy to age 21, cerebral palsy among the conditions they list.

First Steps in Jefferson County

Kentucky’s early intervention program for children from birth to three is First Steps. Under 902 KAR 30:120, a child qualifies with an established risk condition confirmed by a physician, or with a significant developmental delay found on evaluation. A child who qualifies through an established risk condition gets a five area assessment to plan services, not a test to prove a delay. Ask the Point of Entry whether your child’s diagnosis is on the state’s list.

The same regulation lets an approved neonatal follow-up program team find a child eligible on its own clinical judgment. That matters in Louisville, where the neonatal specialists who round at UofL Hospital take part in a state-supported high-risk infant follow-up program. Ask the NICU follow-up clinic whether it will make the referral for you.

Referrals for Jefferson, Bullitt, Henry, Oldham, Shelby, Spencer and Trimble counties go to the KIPDA Point of Entry at 312 Whittington Parkway, Suite 020, in Louisville. The Cabinet for Health and Family Services’ February 2024 office listing gives its number as (502) 429-1249, or (800) 442-0087 toll free.

Louisville NICUs and where the records are

Norton Children’s Hospital and Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital are two campuses of one system, but their NICUs do different work. Surgical repair of complex conditions and ECMO, the heart and lung bypass used for the sickest newborns, happen only downtown. A baby born in St. Matthews who needs either is moved, and the chart follows in two parts. UofL Hospital, part of a separate system, reports that its 24 bed Level III NICU admitted 341 infants in fiscal year 2024.

The records a lawyer needs first are the ones a family is not usually handed at discharge: the electronic fetal monitoring strips, the labor nursing notes, the cord blood gases, the resuscitation record and the first brain MRI. Kentucky’s certificate of merit statute names fetal heart monitor strips and imaging studies as records, and if a family has asked for them and the hospital has not produced them, the certificate is not due until 90 days after they arrive (KRS 411.167).

Jefferson Circuit Court

A malpractice claim over a Louisville delivery is generally filed in Jefferson Circuit Court. Its courtrooms are in the Jefferson County Judicial Center at 700 West Jefferson Street, and the Circuit Court Clerk’s office, where filings go, is across the street in the Louis D. Brandeis Hall of Justice at 600 West Jefferson.

Kentucky’s venue statute, KRS 452.460, sends an injury case to the county where the defendant resides or where the injury was done. A birth at a Louisville hospital is an injury done in Jefferson County, wherever the family lives. That holds for a Southern Indiana family who delivered in Louisville too, though which state’s law governs their claim is a separate question for a lawyer.

Kentucky deadlines and damages for a Louisville claim

These rules are state law and apply in Louisville as they do in Lexington. Our Kentucky cerebral palsy lawyers page covers them statewide.

Kentucky’s one year malpractice period does not run against a child until age 18 (KRS 413.170), so the child’s claim is due by the 19th birthday. The parents’ claim gets no such pause: one year from discovery under KRS 413.140. No law can cap the award, because Section 54 of the 1891 constitution denies the General Assembly that power. A certificate of merit goes in with the complaint, and there has been no review panel step since Commonwealth ex rel. Meier v. Claycomb (2018). Fault is compared, not a bar: a share of it reduces the award (KRS 411.182).

Choosing a Louisville cerebral palsy lawyer

With a one year clock on the parents’ claim, the first thing to ask a Louisville lawyer is how fast they can get the fetal monitoring strips and the NICU chart and put them in front of an obstetrician and a neonatologist. Ask who signs their certificates of merit, and how they handle a case that started at Norton Women’s & Children’s and continued downtown, or one where the delivering physicians belong to a group the hospital does not employ. Because Kentucky does not cap damages, the stakes for the defense are high, so ask whether the firm has taken a birth injury case to verdict and can pay pediatric neurology and neuroradiology experts through trial.

Cerebral Palsy Center pairs families with experienced local birth injury lawyers in Louisville and backs them with the financial resources of larger partner firms, so a case is not settled early because a small firm cannot afford to try it. The review is free. The lawyer advances the costs of the case and is repaid only from a recovery.

View all cerebral palsy lawyers in Kentucky