Traumatic brain injury leads man from ministry aspirations to personal injury law
Ten years ago, Cameron Michael Fathauer was 17 and showing his skateboarding tricks to a neighbor girl when he was hit by a man driving a Lexus and thrown 20 feet away into the grass. One of his shoes was found a week later, hanging from a tree branch.
Fathauer, who was headed to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and planned on becoming a minister, was in a coma for three weeks. He was diagnosed with a type of traumatic brain injury in which the brain rapidly twists and rotates in the skull to cause damage.
“When I woke up, I woke up to a new world that I didn’t recognize,” says Fathauer, now 27.
He relearned everything. Two main things helped Fathauer’s recovery: His faith and the future he had with his fiancée, to whom he had proposed a month before the accident. Fauthauer’s path led him to law school and his practice as a personal injury attorney at Schad Law in New Albany, Indiana.
Fathauer will be the keynote speaker at the American Bar Association’s 2025 National Conference for Lawyer Assistance Programs in Portsmouth, Virginia, discussing lawyer identity in the age of automation. His speech takes place Sept. 18, the 10th anniversary of the accident in which he almost died. Fathauer says his message will be to challenge the legal profession to resist tying personal value to job performance.
“No one can be themselves by themselves.” Lawyers should value recovery, relationships and presence over output, he says.
Last year, Fathauer published a memoir on his experience titled Saving the Subject: How I Found You When I Almost Lost Me, described as a mix of personal narrative, philosophy, theology, poetry and fiction.
When he speaks at the CoLAP conference, he’ll also be sharing a personal practice that enabled him to find stability, which he believes can also help others in the legal profession. He describes his methods as the Performative Utterance Project, a “ritual of mental hygiene.”
“Almost none of us will ever have to endure anything like the obstacles Cameron faces on a daily basis, but we can applaud his success and model his perseverance and intention in our daily lives,” says Yvette Hourigan, chair of the ABA Commission on Lawyers Assistance Programs. “His journey reminds us that well-being is multifaceted.”
Fathauer says that after the accident, he was told he would have problems with “higher-level thinking and executive function.” While recovering at his parents’ house, he battled isolation, loneliness and depression.
Fathauer hired Matt Schad, a local personal injury lawyer, to represent him in a lawsuit against the driver, which Schad says was “settled amicably.” The lawyer became someone who Fathauer saw as a mentor, although his decision to switch to law school didn’t happen right away.
He made up his mind to go to law school after he married Chelsea, the fiancée who stood by him during his recovery. Fathauer attended Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law, graduating in 2021.
Schad says that when Fathauer mentioned switching from the ministry to law school, Schad at first thought it wasn’t a good fit because Fathauer “had shown such passion for the ministry.”
“I also questioned whether he would be able to get into law school and succeed there with the severity of his injuries,” Schad says. “I’m very happy to say that he proved all my doubts wrong.”
Fathauer started working at Schad Law in 2021. He and his wife have four children, including a set of triplets. His wife is pursuing her dream now of becoming a doctor, says Fathauer, whose faith remains “very much a part” of who he is.
“I don’t believe I can be myself without a personal God who’s always there and calls me his own,” he adds.
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