About Gordon S. Johnson, Jr. – Brain Injury Attorney

About Gordon S. Johnson, Jr. of the Brain Injury Law Group

By Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.

I am the author of these pages and have been working on brain injury cases since the early 1990’s. Since founding the Brain Injury Law Group in 1996, I have limited my legal practice to cases involving only brain injury. From my first brain injury case, it was clear to me that neither the legal or the medical community understood the full spectrum of problems caused by brain injury. My first client was the spouse of a woman who worked in my law firm. Thus as I tried to understand his deficits, I learned brain injury from listening to his wife. Listening to her daily reports of what they were going through as a result of his injury told me far more than I found in medical records and doctors’ reports.  Then and now, the treating doctors didn’t get it. The doctors thought he had a complete recovery from what was a moderate brain injury caused by an explosion.

His wife didn’t believe that he made a full recovery, and I believed her. Trying to find answers for them, I attended a national seminar on brain injury. Some of the best minds in the field inspired me to keep digging. In doing so, I discovered my calling and have been doing brain injury cases ever since. I opened my law firm, the Brain Injury Law Group, because I realized that the internet was going to change how information on brain injury reached survivors of it. My first web page, http://tbilaw.com was written in November 1996. I followed that page shortly thereafter with the advocacy page http://waiting.com. These two pages altered the way the public saw brain injury information. It also allowed me to pursue my calling as a brain injury lawyer.

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

As important to my success as connection and networking is my paralegal Jayne Zabrowski. If you call my office you speak to Jayne about your brain injury, you’ll know right away that Jayne is the best at what she does. We are proud of the fact that we get it. We understand that brain injury impairment doesn’t begin and end with an IQ test, that it is more than cognitive disability. Brain injury impacts four areas: cognition, behavior, mood and physical functioning. Even though there may be a cognitive improvement, if problems continue in the other three areas, then disability will persist.

While we get it in terms of disability, we also get it when it comes to recovering from brain injury. I know about the potential for a life time of recovery because I am living that very life of brain injury recovery. I suffered from moderate brain damage that left me with objective evidence on my own MRI. After my injury, I went to law school and have practiced law since 1979. The road to brain injury recovery could be rocky, but the nature of the challenges law school and practicing law demanded of me have much to do with the extent of my recovery. 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 need to accommodate things that my brain does less efficiently than it would before my brain injury.

In taking you on as a client, we would like to do more than only help your legal case but also help you with your recovery from brain injury. The Brain Injury Law Group is especially qualified to help both of these goals.

If you are interested in knowing the biographical stuff, I graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1975. I graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1979. (My own brain injury happened in 1975, about two of months before graduating from Medill.) Eight years before I started the Brain Injury Law Group in 1996, I was a general practice attorney in the small town of Berlin, WI, with the law firm, Gonyo and Johnson.

I have license to practice law in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. I have managed cases pro hac vice in another 15 states.

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

I frequently lecture and write about brain injury. I 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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