NFL, ex-players prep for struggle over concussions

PHILADELPHIA (AP) a' With possibly vast amounts of dollars at risk, a hearing Tuesday over concussion lawsuit filed from the NFL promises to be a brawl between appropriate heavyweights. About 4,200 former participants have prosecuted the group. Some suffer from dementia, depression, Alzheimer's illness and other neurological dilemmas. The others simply want their health watched. And a tiny number, including Ray Easterling and 12-time Pro Bowler Junior Seau, committed suicide after long downward spirals. The participants' lawyers accuse the NFL of marketing violence in the game and concealing identified cognitive challenges from concussions and other blows to the top. They hope to keep the lawsuit in federal court so they could use the discovery process to access NFL documents a and see what the group knew when. "The NFL failed to meet its responsibility: it negligently heightened players' experience of repeated head injury and fraudulently concealed the serious brain injuries that resulted," the players' solicitors wrote in their latest brief, filed in January. The NFL, with $9.2 billion in annual revenues, claims that the issues belong in settlement under conditions of the collective bargaining agreement. The group demands it's made a top priority to person safety and often followed the very best available science. "The principle inside our category is simple: Medical decisions bypass anything else," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a speech last month at the University of New York. The NFL is likely to be represented Tuesday by Paul Clement, a former U.S. Attorney general under President George W. Bush who has struggled gay marriage, gun-control actions and President Barack Obama's state health care mandates before the Supreme Court. Players' attorney David Frederick, an Obama friend, has had customer protection fights over investor expenses and prescription drug warnings to the high court. "They spend most of their time, Paul Clement and David Frederick, at the Supreme Court," said Paul Anderson, a Missouri lawyer who monitors the NFL litigation on his site, nflconcussionlitigation.com. "This can be a multibillion-dollar issue. That is why both parties went out and hired the best of the best." Elderly U.S. Area Judge Anita W. Brody of Philadelphia will hear the case and decide if the lawsuits stay static in federal court or are "pre-empted" by the collective bargaining agreements. Since she had been given the 2011 Easterling suit, the first ever to be recorded results of relevant lawsuits around the country have been steered to her. If Brody factors with the players, she would then rule on some broader issues, which are required to include hard-fought battles over the technology of concussions and head injuries, along with the players' claims of fraud and neglect. The circumstances could then be came back for their home states to resolve individual damage claims, predicated on each player's record. If the NFL dominates, individual arbitration awards must be sought by the players. But whilst the situation plays out no money is expected to change hands for years. Brody's judgment, that could take weeks, will probably be appealed by the losing side. As an alternative, she could issue a mixed ruling due to a six-year "gap," from 1987 to 1993, when there clearly was no collective bargaining agreement set up. The NFL, wanting to prevent finding, has suggested that those players were bound by past contracts or contracts in place when they later obtained pensions. Equally, the league had no union contracts in position before 1968, but Anderson and others question whether those participants have much of an incident, because most of the medical findings linking concussions to possible brain incidents appeared in the 1990s and later. Goodell, in his UNC conversation, called concussions "a global problem, not just a baseball issue." He said on mental performance, which he said affects hundreds of thousands of people the league has pledged $30 million to the National Institutes of Health for broad-based research. And he said the most recent players' commitment sets aside yet another $100 million for research on the next decade. The most recent concussion study at the Boston University School of Medicine, released in January, appeared at the given minds of 85 those who had suffered head injury in football, hockey, boxing or military battle. The study found 68 had proof serious traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease also found in Seau's brain following the popular person shot himself in-may. "This success comes at a high price to the people who make the game great," Seau's parents said inside their litigation, which was combined with the other Brody cases last month.