What Damages are Available in a Personal Injury Case?

The damages are extensive in a personal injury case, but they’re common sense damages that most people would know about, or if you asked, most people would be able to list them. So of course if you’re injured in a a wreck through no fault of your own, you’re going to incur medical bills. That’s an element of your damages. You might be out of work and you have some lost wages, even if you have to use your sick time or your vacation time, that’s sick time or vacation time you won’t have to use for something else in the future, so that would go into the lost wages calculation. Some catastrophic injury cases we see the person has a loss of earning capacity, which means they’re not ever going to be able to go back to the job they had before the accident and earn the same amount of money, because they can’t do that type of work anymore. So if we have to get an economist involved to talk about a loss of earning capacity, we’ll do that. So things like lost wages, medical bills, loss of earning capacity, those are elements of damage that it’s easy to put a number on. You can obviously look at a medical bill, you can go look at your pay stubs and see the income dip if you can’t go back to the same salary, you can see what the difference is and what you’re making before. There’s also non-economic damages, which are a little harder to calculate but they’re still very real. Pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish, those all come with an injury. You’re going to be in pain outside of the doctor’s office, you’re not going to be able to do your normal activities either at all or as well for a certain period of time– hopefully you get back into those, but those are all things that we talk to our clients about because those are things that the insurance company needs to hear about, because if they don’t know what the client’s gone through outside of the doctor’s office, they’re not going to be able to fully evaluate the claim. And if we have to file a lawsuit and take it to trial, we want the jury to hear about these damages because that’s part of the injury, that’s what the client went through, and the jury’s job is to make the person whole for having gone through this through no fault of their own. So that’s part of the whole story– how did this disrupt your life? What were the inconveniences? Tell us about that pain, how long did it last? What activities were disrupted, what could you not do for a while, what could you not do at all, did you have to rely on others? We talk to the client about that throughout our representation, because we want them to be constantly thinking about how this is affecting them. At a certain poin,t especially if it goes to trial, they’re going to have to explain this to a judge or a jury, and we want them to be prepared to do that. [Music] No need to worry, call Cooper Hurley. The car crash experts. 333-3333.