The legal system provides injured victims with the right to seek compensated losses. In that way, any victim should be able to get back to the point where he or she was financially, before the accident.
What losses must be compensated?
• Cost for medical treatment
• Lost income, at present time and in the future
• Damaged or lost property
• Pain and suffering: issues that relate to the claimant’s discomfort.
Emotional distress: This would be distress that had been caused by the injury’s effects. For instance, an inability to sleep soundly, perhaps due to pain, could lead to sleep deprivation, and that could cause daily life to become a source of stress. A personal injury lawyer could also work on showing that a client that had been inconvenienced by a given injury might begin to feel stressed.
Loss of enjoyment: This usually refers to the degree that an injury might have kept the victim/claimant from enjoying a hobby or a certain recreational activity, such as a favored sport. However, if a victim had suffered a catastrophic injury, and had become a quadriplegic, then he or she might lack even an enjoyment of life.
Loss of consortium: Mention of this loss usually focuses on how a given injury’s effects have disrupted the relationship between the injured victim and that same victim’s spouse.
What sort of evidence could be used to showcase pain and suffering or loss of enjoyment?
Sometimes, personal injury lawyer in Huntsville uses a video camera to tape the daily life of a client. Such taped footage should have the ability to spotlight the challenges that face the client/victim on a daily basis.
If an injured client had pictures or a video clip of a time when he or she had been enjoying a sport or a hobby, those pictures could be shown to the jury. Ideally, the client’s condition would have made clear the fact that the plaintiff’s accident-caused injuries had forced an abandonment of that particular pleasure.
How the concept of compensated losses can change from state to state.
The legal system in any state has the authority to designate which problems go under the heading of pain and suffering. In some states emotional distress gets placed under the heading of pain and suffering. Why could such a placement cause problem for personal injury lawyers?
Sometimes, a jurisdiction has chosen to put a limit on the amount of money that a plaintiff could ask for pain and suffering. If emotional distress had been placed under pain and suffering, then a plaintiff might go uncompensated for that particular problem. That same problem would not develop in cases where emotional stress and pain and suffering were viewed as different losses.