One of the first questions clients tend to have for personal injury lawyers is about figuring out what compensation might be due. After all, how does anyone attach a monetary value to something like a compound fracture, severed nerve, or spinal cord injury? Personal injury attorneys deal with these questions all the time, and here's how they calculate the damages that their clients should seek.
Tallying the Medical Bills
By far the simplest part of this process is taking the existing medical bills and tallying them up. The hardest part of adding up the medical bills is making sure you get all of them. If you fail to include something for your lawyer to see, you won't be able to ask for it later if you reach a settlement or judgment.
Also, it's important to avoid conflating unrelated medical bills with those from your injury case. Only bills tied directly to the injuries arising from an accident are compensable. If there's anything in the claim that might be tied to a pre-existing condition, that may be grounds for the insurance adjuster to reject the case entirely.
Loss of Past and Future Earnings
Earnings that were already lost from the time of the injury until you file the claim are fairly straightforward to calculate. Most personal injury lawyers look at a client's last two years' worth of tax returns to determine how much they would have made if they haven't been hurt. Future earnings are calculated in a similar fashion.
One thing to be aware of is that future earnings are only based on your employment at the time you were hurt. If you were going to school for a better-paying job, for example, you can't claim the economic value of that job. Instead, you must claim the value of the occupation you were actively involved in at the time of your injuries.
Pain and Suffering
The standard approach to calculating the value of pain and suffering is to use a multiplier. By this point, most personal injury attorneys have arrived at a number for whatever case they're working on. Traditionally, a multiplier somewhere between 1.5 and 5 is applied to the actual damages.
Usually, the multiplier is based on the severity of the injuries and how long the pain and suffering have lasted. A person with permanent pain from a catastrophic incident might use 5, while someone who recovered quickly and no longer experiences any pain might use a 1.5.
For more information about how personal injury lawyers can help you compensate for damages, contact a local law office.
