The minute that you get injured as the result of an accident, you have the chance to launch a personal injury case. That can demand a good deal of effort. Do you want to put forth that amount of effort? What would be the case’s value? What would be your expected compensation?
In order to develop an estimate of your compensation, you have to study the extent of the damages. That could include both compensatory and punitive damages. Yet, any one victim can also lower the expected value of a case by failing to carry out all of a victim’s acknowledged responsibilities.
What would be your expected compensatory damages?
Those are the monetary costs that must be covered, in order to get you back to where you were before the accident. Compensatory damages include the losses sustained due to property damage, medical costs and loss of income. The monetary value of such losses is fairly easy to calculate.
Some of the other losses can prove more difficult to calculate for instance, victims of an accident sometimes have to deal with pain and suffering. Emotional distress can be a part of that suffering. An accident’s psychological impact can get displayed in the extent of the victim’s emotional distress.
Such feelings are almost impossible to measure. Fear, anxiety and loss of sleep normally become the biggest contribution to a victim’s sense of emotional distress. No piece of equipment can be used to measure fear or anxiety. Consultations with a psychologist and an economist might offer some clue as to the monetary costs of such fear and anxiety.
Additional losses experienced by an injured victim could increase the value of a personal injury case. Those added losses would be things like the disappearance of a victim’s ability to enjoy life. Sometimes an injury to one person causes someone else to suffer a loss of consortium. That might add to any one case’s value.
How plaintiff’s actions can affect compensatory damages:
Plaintiff is expected to minimize the extent of such damages by seeing a doctor as soon as possible. Victims that fail to take that action should expect to have some money deducted from their compensation package. That fact should not be overlooked, whenever an effort has been made by personal injury lawyer in Huntsville to determine the value of some victim’s personal injury case.
Could there be punitive damages?
The court awards punitive damages if a defendant has exhibited egregious or exceedingly careless behavior. The court seeks to prevent a repetition of such behavior by asking the defendant to pay a larger amount of money. That payment is meant to serve as a type of punishment, one that the court has placed on the defendant.