Understanding Damages In Personal Injury Law
Contrary to what many corporations, insurance companies and tort reform groups would like you to believe, people do not file injury lawsuits for recreational purposes. Nor do they file them because they want to “get rich.” Injury lawsuits are filed because injury victims have lost something that is valuable to them.
This is the premise of practically any lawsuit, injury or otherwise. Corporation A will routinely file a lawsuit against Corporation B because they believe that the actions of Corporation B cost them money. This happens all the time. In fact, if you look at your average court docket, you will see that most of the lawsuits involve contract disputes rather than tort or injury cases.
While many contract disputes center around the loss of money, injury cases center around the loss of other things. They involve the loss of mobility, the loss of the ability to work or the loss of a loved one. And unfortunately, since many of these losses don’t have strict price tags on them, many states have decided to do that for us in the form of “caps” on certain types of damages.
What this means is that in many states, there are limits to the amount that you can be compensated, no matter how grievous the damage to yourself, your loved ones or your property.
What follows is a breakdown of the types of damages that can be claimed in a personal injury case, as well as notations on which types are “capped” in some states.
Broadly speaking, there are two categories of damages that an injury victim can receive in the event that his or her case is successful. The first category is compensatory damages, while the other is punitive damages. Compensatory damages are meant to both restore your finances after the expenses of your injury and to provide you with monetary compensation for non-material losses. We’ll get more specific in a moment. Punitive damages are meant as a financial penalty against the person, persons, group or corporation that was responsible for the injury. Punitive damages are somewhat rare.
Getting more specific, here are the sorts of damages that fall under the compensatory column, but please bear in mind that just because you could win some or all of these damages doesn’t mean that you will win all of these damages, or that you will even win at all. There are absolutely no guarantees in a courtroom.
Monetary: These are for the obvious costs to you due to your injury. It means medical expenses (including any future care or rehabilitation that you might need,) as well as any costs that might occur due to your getting accustomed to a disability. Learning to live with any disability costs money, whether it’s training and rehabilitation or completely altering the way you live. For instance, someone newly confined to a wheelchair shouldn’t have to bear the costs of making his home wheelchair accessible if someone else was responsible for his injury.
You should also be able to recover your lost wages. That doesn’t only mean the money you lost when you weren’t at work. It could also mean the amount of money that you would have earned at that job had you not been injured. You should also be able to recover the value of any damaged or destroyed property.
If this was a particularly bad accident, you should also be able to recover the funeral costs of burying your loved ones.
Non-Monetary: These are the sort of damages for which there was no material loss. In other words, these damages aren’t paying for any money that you might have lost or any costs that you had to bear due to your injury. These damages are meant to compensate you for any pain that you went through, either physical or emotional.
These damages are commonly known as “Pain and Suffering,” which is supposed to compensate you for exactly that. In the event that the suit is being filed by widows or widowers rather than victims (in other words, if the incident involved death rather than injury), either the husband or wife could receive what are called “Loss of Consortium” damages. “Loss of Consortium” is basically compensation for the loss of companionship, affection, or any of the immeasurable emotional losses that occur when someone loses a spouse.
An important thing to remember about the non-monetary damages is that they are the sort that fall under “caps” in many states. For instance, Texas has a limit of $250,000 in non-monetary damages that can be awarded in medical malpractice cases. For a list of which states carry caps on non-economic damages, please follow this link.
A case illustrating how an individual is harmed through damage caps is that of Mrs. Connie Spears. According to the NY Times, Mrs. Spears suffered as a result of a medical malpractice in the state of Texas. She went to the emergency room with pain in her legs. Pain she’s felt before. They sent her home. Now she is in a wheelchair as a double leg amputee due to a misdiagnosis at the emergency room. “For Mrs. Spears, the double amputee, the double amputee, the frustration- and the humiliation- is daily. She used to cook, clean and care for her elderly mother, but now she needs help to go to the bathroom, to shower, to get around. “I’m dead weight”, Mrs. Spears said. “And the more I peive things together, the more angry I get.” Due to the damage caps in Texas, Mrs. Spears cannot find a lawyer to help her.
We would like to re-iterate that should you decide to move forward with a personal injury case, there is no guarantee about receiving any of these forms of compensation, nor of winning your case. However, the lawyers at Greenberg and Bederman have been fighting for the legal protections of the injured in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. for over twenty-five years now, and we will fight for our clients. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.
![BlogSearch.com](<A HREF="http://www.blog-search.com"> <IMG SRC="http://www.blog-search.com/images/smallbutton.gif" WIDTH=80 HEIGHT=15 BORDER=0 ALT="Blog Search: The Source for Blogs"></A>...){kind=link}