About Gordon Johnson – Brain Injury Attorney

About Gordon Johnson of the Chicago Brain Injury Group

By Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.

I am the author of these pages and have been doing brain injury cases since 1992. Since opening the Brain Injury Law Group in 1996, I have limited my practice to cases involving brain damage. With my first brain injury case, I realized that neither the legal community or the medical community really understood the full extent of the disability that came after brain injury. My first client was the husband of a woman who worked in my firm, so I learned brain injury not only from the legal side, but also from listening to her daily reports of the challenges she and her husband were going through as a result of his injury.  As with the large majority of brain injured persons I have represented over those years, the treating doctors didn’t get it. The diagnosis was a complete recovery from what was a moderate brain injury from an explosion.

I wasn’t satisfied with that explanation and attended a national seminar on brain injury, with some of the best minds in the field. It was then I discovered my calling and have been doing brain injury since. I opened the Brain Injury Law Group in 1996 because I realized that the internet was going to change how information on brain injury reached those who needed it. I wrote my first web page, http://tbilaw.com in November of 1996 and followed it shortly thereafter with the advocacy page http://waiting.com. Those two pages changed how the world looked at brain injury information and my career.

Since then I have been involved in legal cases that have generated more than $160 million in recoveries for my clients. Those cases have been all over the country and have involved many other skilled trial attorneys. But the key to the success for those clients was the connection we have to brain injury and the networking which comes from a generation years of devotion to this field.

As important to my success as any other factor is my paralegal Jayne Zabrowski. If you call our number, you will get to speak to Jayne about your brain injury. Jayne is simply the best at what she does. You will learn this immediately. We pride ourselves in getting it, understanding the disability doesn’t start and stop with an IQ test, or even a cognitive disability. Brain injury impacts four domains: cognitive, behavioral, mood and physical functioning. Even though there may be a cognitive recovery, if challenges continue in the other three domains, then disability will persist.

While we get it in terms of the persisting deficits, we also get it when it comes to recovery. I am the survivor of a moderate brain injury and I do have objective evidence of that injury on my own MRI. But after my injury, I went to law school, have practiced law since 1979. The road to success for me was not always smooth, but the nature of the challenges schooling and my profession laid down for me, have much to do with the extent of my recovery. I believe in a lifetime of recovery from brain injury. I know that I am better this year than I was in 2014. I hope to keep getting better. But I also have learned that I have to accommodate my shortfalls.

In representing you, we want not only to help your legal case but to help your brain injury recovery. I think the Brain Injury Law Group is uniquely situated to help both objectives.

If you are the kind of person who needs the objective stuff, I am a 1975 graduate of  the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. I graduated cum laude from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1979. (My brain injury occurred in 1975, a few weeks before graduating from Northwestern.) In the eight years before founding the Brain Injury Law Group in 1996, I was a general practice lawyer in the small town of Berlin, Wisconsin, with the firm of Gonyo and Johnson.

I am licensed to practice law in Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. I have handled cases pro hac vitae in another 15 states.

I am a past chair of the Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, the brain injury arm of the American Association of Justice (the national trial lawyers group.) I was also appointed to the Wisconsin TBI Task Force by Governor Scott McCallum  in 2002.  I have served on the board of directors of the Brain Injury Association of Wisconsin and been the organizations newsletter editor.

I am a frequent author and lecturer on brain injury and am available to speak to your group on related topics, almost anywhere in the United States. Just ask.

Gordon Johnson

Attorney Gordon Johnson is one of the nations leading brain injury advocates. He is Past-Chair of the TBILG, a national group of more than 150 brain injury advocates. He has spoken at numerous brain injury seminars and is the author of some of the most read brain injury web pages on the internet.

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