If you’ve been injured in a situation that involves someone else’s negligence – like a car accident or slip and fall incident at a retail store – you may be wondering how much your personal injury claim is worth. And the answer is…it depends.
Medical Expenses
The foundation of any personal injury claim is the cost of your medical treatments. If there’s no injury, then there’s really no case to begin with. That’s why the claim always begins with medical expenses and then snowballs from there to include other tangential aspects.
When it comes to medical expenses, the claim takes into account expenses that have already been incurred and estimated future medical costs. Everything from emergency room visits, surgery costs, medications, physical therapy, and long-term care needs are accounted for. These figures are typically straightforward as they’re based on actual medical bills and projected costs provided by medical professionals.
Lost Wages
If your injury has forced you to take time away from work, you can claim compensation for these lost wages. This calculation is relatively simple: It’s typically based on your current earnings multiplied by the time you’ve been off work.
More complex, however, is estimating future loss of earnings. This comes into play if your injuries prevent you from returning to work in the same capacity as before. Calculations for future losses consider your age, career trajectory, and the permanence of your injuries, often requiring expert testimony to estimate accurately.
Obviously, this number can’t be predicted as accurately as lost wages that have already occurred. However, this is where having an attorney on your side really helps.
Pain and Suffering
This is where the calculation can become subjective and significantly varies from one case to another. Pain and suffering compensation is intended to cover the physical pain and emotional distress you endure as a result of the accident. Factors like the severity of your pain, the intrusive nature of your injuries in daily life, and the length of your recovery play crucial roles in this calculation.
Lawyers often use different methods to quantify pain and suffering, such as the multiplier method (multiplying your actual damages by a certain number based on the severity of your pain) or the per diem approach (assigning a daily rate to your pain and multiplying it by the number of days you are affected).
Permanent Disability or Disfigurement
If the accident results in permanent disability or disfigurement, these factors significantly increase the value of your claim.
“Normally, injured victims can expect a higher settlement if they suffered life-altering or catastrophic injuries like brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, disabilities, and severe disfigurement or scarring, among others,” Bamieh & De Smeth points out.
Compensation in cases of disability or disfigurement is designed to cover both the long-term economic impacts (such as inability to perform work or requiring lifelong medical care) and the psychological distress associated with living with a disability or disfigurement.
Comparative Negligence
In many states, the concept of comparative negligence will impact your compensation. This rule adjusts the amount of your recovery based on your percentage of fault in the accident.
“Broadly, there are three types of comparative negligence rules followed within different jurisdictions in the United States,” Investopedia explains. “They depend on the percentage of negligence assigned to parties involved in an accident.”
The first type is called pure comparative negligence. This rule permits the plaintiff to recover damages, even if they’re assigned 99 percent fault for the accident. While rare, it’s possible a plaintiff could still recover one percent of the damages in a case like this. Only 12 states have this rule in place, though there are two big ones – California and New York.
With modified comparative negligence, plaintiffs can’t recover monetary damages if their fault falls beyond a certain percentage. The most common “threshold” is 50 percent or 51 percent. In total, 33 states use a modified comparative negligence model.
Next, there’s a slight/gross negligence rule. South Dakota is currently the only state to recognize this rule, which assigns fault by “slight” and “gross” contributions to the accident.
Then you have four states, which includes Alabama and Maryland, where pure contributory negligence rules are followed. With this rule, the plaintiff can’t recover any damages if they contributed any slight bit to an accident.
Insurance Policy Limits
Lastly, the policy limits of the involved insurance policies can also limit the amount of compensation available. No matter the severity of your injuries or the clarity of the other party’s fault, the insurance policy’s maximum coverage amount might cap the compensation you can receive. This is why identifying all possible liable parties and their respective coverages is an essential part of building your claim.
What’s Your Case Worth?
Now that we’ve covered some of the different aspects of personal injury claims, you should be able to understand why the answer to the question of worth is always…it depends. However, if you have a good attorney on your side, you can typically increase the worth of the case simply by leveraging a variety of resources.
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