Wilson Kehoe Winingham Filed College Football Players' Concussion Claims Against the NCAA

In July 2016, a series of class-action lawsuits reached federal courts around the country, each brought by a former college football player who said the people running the sport knew about the danger of repeated head blows and did little to warn him. Wilson Kehoe Winingham, the Indianapolis firm, was counsel in two of those cases.

Christopher Burkholder played fullback and tight end at Wake Forest from 1996 to 1999. He said the hits he took in drills and games would make him "see stars and have throbbing pain in his head." Years later he was dealing with light sensitivity and sleep disorders that required ongoing treatment. His complaint, filed July 7, 2016 in the Southern District of Indiana as case 1:16-cv-1812, named Wake Forest, the NCAA, and the Atlantic Coast Conference. Bill Winingham of WKW signed on as his attorney, working with Edelson PC and Raizner Slania LLP.

The firm also served as local counsel for William Crawford, an offensive lineman who played at the University of North Carolina from 1978 to 1982. Crawford traced a 1979 practice concussion to later cognitive problems, including reduced processing speed, memory loss, depression, and insomnia. His suit sought to represent every former UNC football player from 1953 to 2010, the year the NCAA put concussion-management rules in place. The defendants were the NCAA and the ACC.

The complaints argued that the NCAA had assumed a duty to protect athletes, then hid what it knew about the long-term effects of concussions and smaller repeated hits, including the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The claims included negligence, fraudulent concealment, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment. The NCAA pushed back, with its chief legal officer calling the filings "mere copycat activity."

The cases joined a much larger fight. Federal judges had already gathered dozens of these suits into one multidistrict proceeding in Chicago, In re NCAA Student-Athlete Concussion Injury Litigation. That litigation produced a separate medical-monitoring settlement worth roughly $75 million, approved in 2016, which set up brain-injury screening for current and former college athletes. The single-school personal-injury cases that WKW helped file, which sought money damages for individual players, were folded into the same multidistrict docket and continued there rather than ending in a quick payout.

Burkholder's complaint asked for class certification and a jury trial.