You are entitled to compensation when you get injured due to someone else’s negligence. But you are only eligible for the damages caused by the accident itself.
Your settlement will consist of two types of damages: economic and non-economic.
Economic Damages
Economic damages consist of the monetary losses you suffered from your accident. In many personal injury cases, calculating them is a matter of tallying up the following:
- Medical bills
- Lost wages
- Property damage
- Rehabilitation costs
- Household service costs
- Other out-of-pocket costs
Some economic damages are less straightforward. For example, if your accident has impacted your ability to work a full-time job in your career field, you’d also be eligible for loss of earning capacity damages.
These are economic damages but are future-based, so they are harder to calculate. Personal injury attorneys usually work with forecasting experts who take your entire career history into account to arrive at a fair figure.
The amount is ultimately negotiable and serves as “reasonable compensation” for the loss of opportunity and ability rather than an exact dollar amount of what you could have earned if you could have kept working in that capacity clear through to retirement.
Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages are also known as “pain and suffering” damages.
The law recognizes pain as something compensable, but pain is subjective and difficult to prove.
Lawyers generally arrive at a number by assigning a multiplier from 1 to 5, where 5 is the worst possible injury. To make their case for the higher multipliers, we provide evidence as to how the injury has impacted a client’s life and made it difficult or impossible to enjoy the same day-to-day activities they enjoyed before the accident.
We then apply the multiplier to your economic losses to come up with a figure. So if you had $100,000 in economic losses, and your multiplier is 2, you’ll receive an additional $200,000 in pain and suffering damages for a total of $300,000.
Pain and suffering damages are highly negotiable. There is no chart or schedule in New York that offers guidance for which injuries should be eligible for which multipliers. It takes an outstanding negotiator to maximize these awards.
Get Help Today
You deserve the maximum compensation you can get from your personal injury case, but securing a fair settlement alone will be impossible.
Contact our office to schedule a free consultation. Our lawyers will stand by your side and help you attain the best possible settlement for your personal injury case.
See also:
Understanding Negligence in New York Personal Injury Cases
Personal Injury Lawyers in NYC