What Is a Life Care Plan, and When Should You Call a Park City Catastrophic Injury Lawyer?

A life care plan is an individualized projection of the medical care, therapy, equipment, medication, and attendant care an injured person will need for life. Every item carries a current price and a replacement interval. A Park City catastrophic injury lawyer orders one when the injury is permanent and future care drives the value of the claim.

William Andrews Injury Attorney handles catastrophic injury claims in Park City and across Utah. Will Andrews has been licensed in Utah since 2004 and brings 20+ years of legal experience. Catastrophic cases turn on numbers nobody can look up yet. This page explains who builds those numbers and how the defense attacks them.

Call William Andrews Injury Attorney at 801-322-HURT for a free consultation available 24 hours a day. If there is no recovery, there is no attorney’s fee.

What a Life Care Plan Actually Is

A life care plan is a document, not an estimate. It lists each item a person will need, how often it recurs, what it costs, and who recommended it. The catastrophic injury team at William Andrews Injury Attorney uses that document as the spine of the damages case.

The plan covers a lifetime. A 28-year-old with a C5 spinal cord injury may live another four decades, and the plan carries every year of it. Bills paid to date are history. The plan is the future, and the future is where the money sits.

The Categories a Plan Prices Out

Every plan follows the same skeleton. It separates physician follow-up and surgery from therapy, medication, equipment, supplies, and paid attendant care. That separation matters because each category has a different price curve and a different replacement cycle. A drug taken twice a day for forty years outweighs most single surgeries. A defense expert attacks the categories one at a time.

Equipment, Supplies, and Replacement Intervals

Durable medical equipment is where a real plan separates from guesswork. A power wheelchair, a shower chair, a patient lift, and a pressure-relief mattress each appear with a unit cost. The figure that decides the total is not the price of the chair. It is how many chairs.

Why a Power Wheelchair Is Not a One-Time Purchase

A power chair has a service life, and the plan replaces it at that interval for the rest of the person’s life. Batteries, cushions, and controls come sooner. Over four decades one chair line becomes eight or nine replacements plus hundreds of parts.

How Home and Vehicle Modification Gets Priced

A wheelchair user needs doorways widened, a roll-in shower, a ramp, and lowered counters. In Park City the plan often adds heated entry surfaces, because an iced ramp is unusable for a person with no leg function. Adapted vans get replaced on a cycle too.

Attendant Care and Supervision

Attendant care is usually the largest single number in a catastrophic plan. The plan states hours per day, the skill level required, and whether the care is agency-provided or family-provided. A person needing 16 hours a day of licensed nurse coverage generates a yearly figure larger than most salaries.

What a Life Care Plan Is Not

A life care plan is not a wish list, and it is not a settlement demand. Lost earnings belong to the economist and the vocational expert, not to this document. Pain and suffering are not in it either. The plan also does not create medical opinions, because a planner who invents a treatment recommendation hands the defense an easy motion.

Who Builds the Plan and Who Prescribes the Care

Two different people are involved, and mixing them up is the fastest way to lose the plan. A credentialed life care planner assembles and prices the document. A treating physician supplies the medical recommendations the planner prices. The planner does not prescribe. A plan that reads as though the planner decided the care gets excluded.

Most planners come from one of two backgrounds. Rehabilitation nurses and rehabilitation counselors fill most of the field. Both spend their careers estimating what a disabled person will need next. A defense attorney asks about the credential early in a deposition.

The Certified Life Care Planner Credential

The Certified Life Care Planner, or CLCP, is the oldest and most widely held certification in the field. It comes from the International Commission on Health Care Certification, which has administered the exam since 1996. Candidates need at least 120 hours of post-graduate training in life care planning, including 16 hours on methodology and standards of practice. They also document three years of field experience.

The Certified Nurse Life Care Planner Credential

The Certified Nurse Life Care Planner, or CNLCP, is the registered nurse track. It comes from the Universal Life Care Planner Certification Board, and Professional Testing Corporation runs the examination. A candidate needs an unrestricted RN license for three years, plus 2,000 paid hours assessing lifetime treatment needs. The exam covers brain injury, spinal cord injury, burns, and chronic pain.

How a Park City Catastrophic Injury Lawyer Turns the Plan Into a Number

The planner produces care items priced in today’s dollars. That is not the number a jury sees. A Park City catastrophic injury lawyer hands the plan to a forensic economist, who converts a stream of future costs into one present-day figure. In a traumatic brain injury case that conversion can move the demand by half.

Two assumptions do almost all of the work. The first is the discount rate, meaning the return your money would earn if paid today. The second is medical cost inflation, meaning how fast the care itself gets more expensive. Move either one by a point and the total swings by seven figures.

The Forensic Economist and Present Value

Present value answers one question. What lump sum, invested today, would fund a cost that arrives in year thirty? The answer depends entirely on the return you assume, and the two sides never assume the same thing. Utah juries hear this argument in almost every catastrophic case. Nothing else in the file moves the final total as far as this one assumption.

The Discount Rate Fight in Plain English

A defense economist argues for a high discount rate. A high rate assumes your settlement earns a strong return, so a smaller sum today funds the same care. The other side argues for a low rate tied to safe instruments, because an injured person cannot afford market risk.

Medical Cost Inflation Runs Above General Inflation

Care does not inflate at the rate of groceries. Analysis of federal price data by the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker put medical care prices up 121.3% since 2000. All consumer goods and services rose 86.1% over that period. Applying general inflation to a life care plan understates it.

Life Expectancy Tables After a Spinal Cord Injury

Every number in the plan gets multiplied by years, so life expectancy is the largest lever in the case. The National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center publishes the tables both sides use. Its 2026 data sheet gives a 20-year-old with paraplegia about 43.0 more years, against about 59.2 for someone uninjured. The same sheet puts average first-year expenses for high tetraplegia at $1,446,827.

Whether the Plan Gets in Front of a Utah Jury

A plan that never reaches the jury is worth nothing. Utah screens expert testimony under Rule 702 of the Utah Rules of Evidence. The rule follows the federal structure but not the federal wording, which favors a well-built plan.

Rule 702(b) requires “a threshold showing that the principles or methods that are underlying in the testimony” are reliable, based on sufficient facts or data, and reliably applied to the facts. Rule 702(c) says that showing is satisfied when the methods “are generally accepted by the relevant expert community.” The methodology is published, taught, and examined.

The real fight is foundation, not arithmetic. A defense expert hunts for any item no treating physician recommended, then argues the planner invented care. Good practice ties each recommendation to a named provider and a record.

The Utah Rules That Decide What the Plan Is Worth

A perfect life care plan still runs through Utah’s damages rules. Those rules can cut the recovery, cap it, or end it. Most Park City catastrophic cases start as a car accident claim on a highway or a canyon road.

Utah is a no-fault state for medical bills. Section 31A-22-307 sets the personal injury protection medical benefit at “not less than $3,000 per person.” That floor is gone before a trauma patient leaves the emergency department. Section 31A-22-309(1)(a) then permits general damages only for listed injuries, and a catastrophic injury clears that list several times over.

Blogs also conflate two cap rules. Section 78B-3-410 caps noneconomic damages at $450,000 in a malpractice action against a health care provider. Utah places no such cap in an ordinary injury case.

Comparative Fault Bars a Claimant at 50% or More

Utah uses modified comparative fault. Section 78B-5-818(2) lets you recover from defendants whose combined fault “exceeds the fault of the person seeking recovery.” Exceeds means more than, so a claimant found exactly 50% at fault recovers nothing. The common shorthand of a 51% bar is wrong in Utah. Section 78B-5-820 then limits each defendant to its own share, with no contribution between them.

The Deadlines That End a Utah Catastrophic Injury Claim

Utah gives longer than most states, then takes it away in one situation. Section 78B-2-307(4) provides four years for relief not otherwise provided for by law, which is the general personal injury period. A claim against a government entity runs on a different clock. Section 63G-7-402 of the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah bars the claim unless notice is filed within one year.

Those rules apply well beyond life care planning. Our page on what a Utah injury case is worth covers the three situations where Utah caps recovery.

Ski Injuries and the Utah Inherent Risks of Skiing Act

Park City is a ski town, and many catastrophic injuries here happen on snow. The Inherent Risks of Skiing Act sits at Title 78B, Chapter 4, Part 4 of the Utah Code. It changes how a premises liability claim against a resort works.

The Act does two things at once. It bars a skier from recovering against a ski area operator for injury resulting from inherent risks. It also leaves untouched every injury caused by something that is not an inherent risk. Utah’s Supreme Court drew that line above Park City.

What the Act Bars and What It Leaves Open

Section 78B-4-402 defines inherent risks of skiing as “the dangers or conditions that are an integral part of the sport of recreational, competitive, or professional skiing.” The list covers changing weather, snow conditions, terrain variations, and collisions with other skiers. Section 78B-4-403 bars claims for injury resulting from those risks. The operator must also post trail boards listing those risks and the limits on liability under Section 78B-4-404.

What Rutherford v. Talisker Decided

Rutherford v. Talisker Canyons Finance Co., 2019 UT 27, came out of a ski team practice at The Canyons, terrain now part of Park City Mountain Resort. A 10-year-old skier struck machine-made snow on the Retreat run in January 2010 and suffered a brain injury. The Utah Supreme Court held that a parent cannot release a minor child’s prospective negligence claims. It also held that the Act does not bar every claim touching a listed risk.

Where the Report, the Treatment, and the Filing Happen in Summit County

Three practical facts about Park City change how a catastrophic file gets built. The agency that writes the report is not always the city police. Where the patient first lands is rarely where the catastrophic injury gets treated. The court that takes the filing is not in Salt Lake City, even though the judicial district is the same.

Each of those affects evidence, billing, and deadlines. A truck accident claim on Interstate 80 and a ski collision at a resort produce completely different first weeks. Each one starts a different clock, and each one preserves different evidence.

The Agency That Writes the Crash Report Depends on the Road

Inside the city limits, the Park City Police Department responds and writes the report. In unincorporated Summit County, including much of the Snyderville Basin, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office takes the call. On Interstate 80 and the state routes, the Utah Highway Patrol usually works the crash. State Route 224 runs from Interstate 80 at Kimball Junction into town, where it becomes Marsac Avenue.

Park City Hospital Stabilizes and a Level I Center Treats

Park City Hospital is a Level IV trauma center. It stabilizes and transfers. Utah’s Level I trauma centers sit in the Salt Lake Valley, including University of Utah Hospital and Intermountain Medical Center in Murray. AirMed, the air transport program at University of Utah Health, keeps a satellite base in Park City. Air ambulance billing belongs in the plan when repeat transport is likely.

The Third District Court Silver Summit Department

A Summit County injury lawsuit is filed in the Third District Court, which covers Salt Lake, Summit, and Tooele counties. Utah’s district courts are courts of general jurisdiction. The Silver Summit department sits just outside Park City and takes civil filings for the county. Its mailing address became 6128 Paintbrush Road, Suite A, after a new road was built, though the building never moved.

Questions and Answers About Life Care Plans in Park City

These come up in the first meeting on almost every catastrophic file. The answers below are general. The right answer for your case depends on the medical records and on who was at fault. Bring whatever records you already have to the consultation.

None of this replaces advice from a lawyer who has read your file. It is meant to tell you what a life care plan does, when it gets built, and why it matters. Ask about anything here that touches your situation. Nothing on this page is legal advice about your own file.

How Much Does a Life Care Plan Cost to Prepare?

The fee depends on the injury, the volume of records, and whether the planner travels for an in-home assessment. In most contingency fee cases the firm advances the cost as a case expense. You do not write a check up front.

When Should a Life Care Plan Be Ordered in a Utah Case?

The right moment is after the medical picture stabilizes but well before the four-year statute runs. Ordering too early produces a plan built on guesses. Ordering too late leaves no time to fix a foundation problem.

Do I Need a Life Care Plan for a Ski Injury Claim?

You need one if the injury is permanent, whatever caused it. The Inherent Risks of Skiing Act affects whether the resort can be held liable. It does not change what your future care will cost.

What if My Claim Is Against a Government Entity in Summit County?

The one-year notice deadline in Section 63G-7-402 controls, and it replaces the longer general period. A county road defect or a government vehicle puts you on that clock immediately. Treat the notice as the first task.

Talk to a Park City Catastrophic Injury Lawyer Before the Numbers Are Set

The window for building a good life care plan opens while treatment is still going on. Records made during active care carry the recommendations a planner needs. A Park City catastrophic injury lawyer who gets involved early makes sure those recommendations land in writing.

William Andrews Injury Attorney handles catastrophic injury and wrongful death claims throughout Utah. The office sits at 299 South Main, Suite 1310, in Salt Lake City. Will Andrews has been licensed in Utah since 2004.

Call William Andrews Injury Attorney at 801-322-HURT or use the contact page to set up a review. A free consultation is available 24 hours a day, and if there is no recovery, there is no attorney’s fee.

Bring the discharge summary, the imaging reports, and the names of every treating physician.