If you are injured by another person’s carelessness (“negligence”), you are entitled to recover monetary sums (“damages”) for a number of things. The most frequent types of damages in personal injury cases are damages for medical expenses, lost wages, property damage, and pain and suffering.
First of all, you are entitled to get reimbursed for all of your medical expenses, including the costs of paramedics, ambulance transportation to the hospital, emergency room expenses (including doctor’s fees, costs of X-rays, CT scans, and any other diagnostic tests), all treatment you receive, cost of your hospital room if your injury is severe enough to warrant more treatment or observation. You are also entitled to recover any medical expenses you may need in the future to treat your injury. In some cases—such as where the victim was paralyzed from the neck down (quadriplegia)—future medical expenses can be substantial.
You are also entitled to recover monetary damages for the time you are off work (“lost wages”). The damages you can receive for lost earnings are sometimes easy to compute. For instance, if you are out of work for 12 weeks, you are entitled to receive compensation for that time. But let’s say that, because of the accident you are no longer able to return to work, but you can work at a lower-paying job. In that situation, you are entitled to recover the difference between what you would have earned if you had not been injured and what you will actually earn over your life span.
Suppose you ran your own small business but can no longer do so after the accident. In that event, you are entitled to receive the amount you would have earned had you been able to continue running your business. There is one catch to this rule: If you have been running your business for less than a year, you generally are not entitled to recover damages for losing your business, as the law considers damages in such a case too speculative, i.e., there is nothing to compare them to.
You are also entitled to recover money to cover any property damage or loss you suffered in the accident. For instance, if you were involved in a motor vehicle accident that was the other driver’s fault, you are entitled to receive the costs of repairing your car or truck. If the cost of repairing your vehicle is more than your car is worth, then you are entitled to recover only the fair market value of your car at the time it was destroyed. Sometimes the value of your car is less than the balance you owe on it. Despite this, the measure of damages is still only the value of your vehicle when it was destroyed; you are still responsible to the bank or other lender for the full amount.
Another element of damages you are entitled to receive are damages for the pain and suffering you endured or will endure in the future because of your injuries. This includes not only the physical pain you have or will have because of your injuries from the accident, but also the mental and emotional pain you experience as a result of the accident. Damages for pain and suffering often constitute a major portion of the damages you can recover from the negligent party.
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Tags: accident recovery, Damages
