Complex Regional Pain Syndrome presents a unique damages challenge because the condition is often invisible to a jury looking at the plaintiff, while producing pain and functional loss more severe and more permanent than many visibly disfiguring injuries. A CRPS California pothole case requires a damages strategy built around helping a jury understand a diagnosis that does not match their intuitive assumptions about what a serious injury looks like.
$7M
Future medical damages in the underlying verdict
$9M
Future noneconomic damages in the underlying verdict
CRPS is a chronic pain condition that can develop after an injury, often a fracture, and is disproportionate in intensity and duration to the original injury. It can produce burning pain, swelling, skin color and temperature changes, abnormal sweating, and progressive loss of function, with no established cure. A juror evaluating a fractured ankle, an injury many associate with a defined healing timeline, needs medical education to understand why this fracture produced a permanent, disabling pain condition instead.
CRPS diagnosis relies on established clinical criteria, commonly the Budapest Criteria, requiring specific reported symptoms and clinical findings across sensory, vasomotor, sudomotor or edema, and motor or trophic categories. A treating physician or pain-medicine expert should walk the jury through exactly how the diagnosis was reached, referencing the plaintiff's own documented findings rather than presenting a conclusory label, giving the jury an objective framework for why the diagnosis is recognized and not speculative.
Causation testimony must meet the defense argument that the pain is disproportionate by explaining that disproportionate pain is a defining feature of CRPS, and that a common injury like an ankle fracture is a well-documented trigger.
Because CRPS has no cure, a life care planner working with treating physicians should itemize lifetime needs: pain-management visits, medication, interventional procedures such as nerve blocks or spinal cord stimulation, and support, presented with specific costs rather than a lump sum.
Focus on functional and quality-of-life impact: activities lost, sleep disruption, the psychological toll of unrelenting pain with no endpoint, and the impact on relationships, supported by family testimony and the plaintiff's own account.
The case behind this page
A comprehensive medical and life-care damages record drove a verdict reflecting a lifetime of care.
Read the verdict storyRelated team
The engineering, pain-medicine, life-care, and economic witnesses behind a chronic-pain verdict.
Building the trial teamRelated breakdowns from this case and our CRPS practice.
We take catastrophic chronic-pain cases as counsel or co-counsel and pay statutory referral fees.
Refer a caseCRPS is a chronic pain condition that can develop after an injury, often a fracture, producing pain and other symptoms disproportionate to the severity of the original injury, along with changes in skin temperature, swelling, and limb function, with no established cure.
Clinicians typically use established diagnostic criteria, commonly the Budapest Criteria, which require specific findings across sensory, vasomotor, sudomotor or edema, and motor or trophic symptom categories.
A life care planner typically works with treating physicians to project a lifetime of pain management needs, including ongoing appointments, medication, potential interventional procedures, and support services, presented as an itemized plan rather than a single estimated figure.
