If you are making an injury claim after a car accident, you’re probably wondering what proportion your case could be worth. automobile insurance companies use different methods to value a private injury claim, which generally includes reimbursement for medical bills and lost income, including some amount of compensation for a more subjective component of damages called “pain and suffering.” An experienced car accident attorney can assist in helping you identify if you’ve got a legitimate claim for “pain and suffering”.
What Does Pain and Suffering Mean?
Pain and suffering, because the term suggests, encompasses a good sort of trauma caused by a car accident injury. Physical pain, sometimes debilitating, limits an accident victim’s mobility and makes simple and essential life activities excruciating. Physical pain keeps victims out of labor , resulting in financial struggles. It keeps them off of their feet, resulting in health complications from lack of exercise. It digs its way into every corner of a person’s existence.
Along with physical pain comes emotional suffering. Physical pain itself inflicts especially torturous sorts of anxiety and depression. However, even when physical pain subsides, injuries can cause persistent emotional turmoil. An injury that leaves a car accident victim immobilized during a wheelchair, for instance , inflicts psychological difficulty in preventing the victim from participating in activities that wont to make life meaningful. An injury that causes disfigurement results in emotional pain associated with a victim’s appearance and the way disfigurement affects social interaction.
These physical and emotional struggles don’t accompany price tags attached, but they represent real and (sometimes) crushing harm that any human can understand. Our system cannot deduct that sort of trauma, so it uses financial compensation as a way of giving accident victims the resources they have to recover physically and move forward with their lives.
Calculating Pain and Suffering Damages
The value of a car accident injury claim depends on many complex factors. Since pain and suffering may be a noneconomic injury, lawyers, jurors, and insurance adjusters must use measures aside from price tags to work out what proportion it’s worth. Though there’s no fixed formula for calculating pain and suffering damages, as a general matter they increase with the severity and permanence of an injury.
Thus, the quantity of cash a car accident victim might receive in pain and suffering damages will take into account:
- The nature and extent of the injuries,
- Whether the individual suffered any future effects/symptoms (and for a way long),
- How the injuries and symptoms affected the individual, and
- Whether the injuries have resulted, or likely will end in an untimely death.
Pain and suffering damages can seem particularly hard to calculate by counting on past outcomes, because two individuals might suffer an equivalent injury, yet experience different degrees of pain. Instead, the calculation relies upon an inexpensive assessment of the negative impacts of a specific injury on a specific accident victim.
Two common formulas sometimes wont to calculate pain and suffering damage include:
- The multiplier method, which involves adding up a victim’s medical bills and lost wages then multiplying the entire by variety , counting on the severity of the injuries. the size essentially is a shorthand for the strength of the evidence described above.
- The by the day method involves establishing a by the day amount of pain and suffering (such as $100) for each day that passes between the time of the accident and therefore the date (if any) that the victim has made a full recovery. Here, the dollar amount of the by the day serves to encapsulate the strength of the pain and suffering evidence.
Unfortunately, the above listed methods aren’t used nearly as frequently as they were within the past. In fact, most insurance companies in Texas don’t use these methods without modifying them substantially supported the circumstances involved. this alteration has probably occurred largely because juries in Texas are increasingly skeptical of paying large amounts for “pain and suffering”.
Proving Pain and Suffering Damages
Of course, it’s one thing to realize an understanding of how a car accident injury has inflicted pain and suffering, and quite another to prove that harm to an insurance adjuster or a jury. Experienced car accident injury lawyers often work closely with their clients to gather evidence that illustrates the degree and severity of pain and suffering.
Of course, an accident victim can testify about the continuing trauma of a car accident. Courts and insurance adjusters, however, often want to listen to quite simply say-so when it involves proving pain and suffering damages. So, lawyers can also believe objective evidence of those subjective harms, such as:
- Medical records contain a wealth of valuable details, including a diagnosis from a doctor complete with an outline of the patient’s physical pain.
- Testimony from a doctor who has reviewed the client’s medical records and may testify about the degree of pain the client likely feels.
- Testimony from a psychological state expert who has, perhaps, treated the client for emotional struggles resulting from the car accident injury.
- Photographic and video evidence depicting the before and after effects of a car accident injury, like a video of the client playing sports compared to a client confined to a single bed .
- Testimony from relations and friends that provides details about the client’s physical and spirit before and after suffering the injury within the car accident.
- Journals, diaries, and other contemporaneous descriptions of pain and suffering that reflect the client’s in-the-moment (rather than after-the-fact) thoughts about the trauma inflicted by the car accident injury.
All of the sorts of evidence above, et al. almost like it, serve to evoke an empathetic response on the a part of judges, jurors, and insurance adjusters. By helping those parties imagine in their own minds how the client’s injury would feel, the lawyer can argue that the quantity of cash sought in pain and suffering damages is cheap under the circumstances.
To make the foremost of a claim for pain and suffering damages, in other words, accident victims and their families can help by ensuring to preserve the maximum amount evidence as possible, and by avoiding mistakes which will undermine an otherwise strong claim. Taking some simple steps within the days and weeks after a car accident injury can vastly improve an accident victim’s chances of recovering the utmost pain and suffering damages available.
These include:
- Seeking prompt and appropriate medical aid to treat both physical and emotional trauma, in order that if the necessity arises, a treating physician or therapist can potentially testify about the victim’s recovery from day-one, forward.
- Trying as hard as possible to get over pain and suffering, to eliminate any argument that the victim made things worse somehow.
- Keeping a written and/or video journal of the accident victim’s daily struggles.
- Tracking an accident victim’s pain medication needs.
- Staying in-tuned with family and friends who may contribute a crucial perspective on the victim’s before-and-after condition.
- Avoiding posts on social media that paint a happier or healthier picture of the victim than is really the case (or, better yet, just staying off of social media altogether).
- Leaving conversations with insurance adjusters and other representatives of parties with potential legal liability for the accident to an experienced car accident injury lawyer.
By following these simple steps, a car accident victim can build a robust record of the character and extent of the pain and suffering that followed a car crash. When the time involves prove pain and suffering damages, this evidence gives the victim’s legal team something quite the victim’s say-so to prove those damages and recover maximum compensation for them. Call our law offices today at any of our convenient locations and get a free consultation.
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