Mental pain and suffering are mental and emotional impacts that a victim experiences after suffering a serious accident. It can include mental or emotional anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and other negative emotions such as fear, humiliation and anger.
Mental pain and suffering can even be as extreme as leading to depression and anxiety, mood swings and insomnia. Physical pain and suffering are the bodily impacts one experiences post-accident.
It can include pain from broken bones or fractures; neck and back pain, and other forms of nerve damage; brain trauma, such as concussions; and organ damage. Physical injuries that have led to pain and suffering can be long-lasting, affecting victims for years after the incident or even their entire lifetime.
They may have suffered a loss of income due to the inability to go to work and perform the full responsibility of their duties. They may also have piling medical debt due to any necessary treatment, surgeries or rehabilitation required to mend their physical injuries. They may simply seek compensation for being in pain and suffering a lower quality of life due to the incident in which they had no part in causing. Most insurance companies recognize that people who are injured in a car accident deserve something for the way their life has been negatively impacted because of it.
However, it is not specifically stated in the settlement exactly how much was allotted for pain and suffering. Insurance companies will typically use their own pain and suffering calculator. This will help them determine how much they believe your pain and suffering is worth. To do this, they usually multiply your hospital bills by a predetermined number. This one-size-fits-all type of calculating pain and suffering often undervalues the real suffering injured accident victims experience.
Your pain and suffering is unique. As such, you need a settlement amount that accurately compensates you for the pain you suffered after your accident. Working with an injury attorney is one of the best ways to ensure that you receive the amount of money you deserve.
You need a lawyer on your side that is looking out for you. They can protect you from the deceptive tactics used by insurance companies to reduce your claim.
This way you can receive the maximum in pain and suffering. There are many injuries where accident victims could receive money for pain and suffering, a few are:. Insurance companies will usually pay more to those with broken bones or those that have needed surgery over those with soft tissue injuries.
The longer you have been treating with a doctor, the more likely it is your settlement will be higher. Your chance of getting more money for pain and suffering is also higher if you were transported to the hospital in an ambulance. That is usually one of the first questions asked by insurance companies when filing a claim. The call can also be of use to get a higher amount if the case were to go to trial. Jurors would be able to actually listen to the call and hear the worry and how scared the victim was.
Negotiating a settlement for a personal injury claim requires that you calculate a reasonable amount of money that you would accept to resolve your claim. Most insurance companies and injury attorneys rely on some type of formula to give them an idea of what a case is worth. Since every personal injury case is unique, pain and suffering calculations are dependent upon the facts and circumstances of each case. In a personal injury case, there are two ways to calculate pain and suffering.
The multiplier method is when the actual damages are multiplied by a number between 1 and 5, depending upon the severity of your injury. In order to decide what the multiplier is, the insurance company and your attorney will assess the above factors to determine how serious your injuries are.
The more severe, the more your number is multiplied by. As the name implies, this method uses a daily pain and suffering calculator for these kinds of damages. Using this method, a specific dollar amount is paid for each day from the time of the accident until the patient reaches maximum medical improvement. How inconvenient or awful one person may consider a life-long back injury is not the same as another person.
Likewise, how you determine a dollar amount is even trickier since both pain and how it affects someone is extremely subjective. Insurance companies know better than to use a simple pain and suffering calculator when trying to estimate the settlement amount for a personal injury case. They will often use over 70 different factors to calculate what they believe to be the value of your case.
The biggest issue with settlement calculators is their inability to account for important factors that determine the ultimate value of the case. In fact, a settlement calculator will not consider liability i. If the victim was even partially at-fault; their damages will be greatly reduced by their percentage of liability per state law. Causation is a term of art in the field of personal injury law. It is the analysis of whether the act of negligence caused the very injuries complained of by a plaintiff.
A calculator cannot account for this argument and how this may diminish the settlement value of the claim depending on how strong their causation defense is. Personal injury settlement calculators are nothing more than a misleading marketing ploy used by attorney directories and law firms desperate for business. I have seen numerous folks grossly misled and ill-informed as to their damages based on the reliance on a settlement calculator.
Keep in mind the very same fact pattern and injuries can be vastly different based on the county wherein the auto accident or motorcycle accident took place. Your economic damages are the financial losses you sustain because of the injury, such as medical bills, lost wages, and the cost of personal care.
Non-economic damages include the physical, emotional, and mental suffering caused by the accident and your injury. They also include the actual physical harm to your body caused by the accident, such as scarring, disfigurement, and disabilities. Generally, catastrophic injuries that result in permanent impairments increase the value of non-economic damages.
Recovering compensation for pain and suffering damages can be challenging. Therefore, non-economic damages are subjective. Georgia personal injury laws do not require parties to use a specific equation to calculate pain and suffering damages.
Therefore, your pain and suffering damages are worth as much as an insurance company is willing to pay or a jury is willing to award. Several factors can increase the amount of compensation you might receive for pain and suffering damages. Call us at 1 Home Legal Information Personal Injury. There are no strict rules for putting a dollar value on pain and suffering in a personal injury case, but here's what an insurance company might consider.
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