Sustaining an injury caused by the careless or negligent actions of another individual, business, or entity can lead to significant setbacks for a victim. Unfortunately, injury victims often incur significant monetary losses. Many of these losses surround incoming medical bills, lost income, various out-of-pocket expenses, pain and suffering damages, and more. Here, we want to discuss how much a personal injury claim is worth. Pinpointing the exact amount of these injury claims can be challenging, and we want you to understand why that is the case. However, victims should be able to recover compensation from at-fault parties in these situations.
Pinpointing an Exact Value for a Personal Injury Claim is Difficult
If anyone tells you they know exactly how much your personal injury claim is worth before you have even begun to investigate the incident or finish your medical treatment, they are not telling you the truth. Sure, people can make estimates, but no two personal injury claims are exactly alike.
Determining the exact value of a personal injury case will entail thorough investigations into what happened as well as working with trusted economic and medical professionals who can help calculate total expected losses. In fact, there will be no way to know how much a personal injury claim is worth until a person has reached what is called maximum medical improvement and they no longer need medical treatment.
What Goes Into a Personal Injury Settlement Calculation?
What we can do, however, is look at what types of compensation a person can recover and how these amounts are determined.
- Economic compensation. This is also referred to as special damages and includes the types of losses a person sustains that are relatively calculable. This can include, but is not limited to, the following:
- All medical bills related to the injury
- Lost income if a person cannot work
- General household out-of-pocket expenses
- Property damage expenses
- Non-economic compensation. This is also referred to as general damages, and this pertains to the more immeasurable aspects of an injury claim. This includes a person’s:
- Physical pain and suffering damages
- Emotional distress damages
- Loss of quality of life damages
- Loss of consortium for a spouse
When working to calculate economic and non-economic compensation, we could use a few different methods. First, calculating economic compensation involves gathering up all proof of loss. This can include medical bills, property damage receipts, proof of out-of-pocket losses, and more.
Calculating non-economic damages is a bit more challenging because there are no direct bills or receipts associated with these types of pain and suffering losses. What we will find is that an attorney will typically use a “multiplier method.” This means that they will add up all of the economic damages mentioned above and then multiply that by a set number (usually a number ranging from 1.5 to 5) to reach the non-economic total. For example, if a person sustains $10,000 worth of economic damages, an attorney could use a multiplier of “three” to reach a non-economic damage total of $30,000.
When we look at this method of calculating losses, we can see how the total amount of compensation a victim seeks could reach substantial amounts for moderate to severe injuries. The most important thing for an injury victim to understand is that they need to have an experienced personal injury attorney by their side who is willing to fight to ensure that they receive maximum compensation for their losses.