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You’ll need to calculate your damages if you’re ever involved in a personal injury accident. The person who caused your injuries is generally legally responsible for paying for all of your injuries and damages.
While there is no set formula used to calculate personal damages, they tend to be calculated by tallying up actual expenses and multiplying this by a number to arrive at damages for pain and suffering.
There are three different categories of damages to calculate:
● Special damages
● Medical special damages
● General damages
Special damages are easy to calculate because they are specific. These include property damages, medical expenses, and lost wages. Since you can recover all of your actual expenses, it’s important to keep receipts, medical bills, and other documentation relating to this.
Medical special damages include ambulance services, x-rays, doctor’s visits, and more, are actual numbers from the documentation are used to calculate this. Remember that your damages will be calculated based on the amount billed and not on the amount that your or the defendant’s insurance company actually paid.
General damages are intangible and include pain and suffering, as per
Personal Injury Lawyer in North Bay. They will be calculated based on a formula and the nature and severity of your injuries, recovery time, if the family is impacted negatively, and the amount of pain that you’re in. It also factors in if you can live your life in the way that you were able to before your personal injury accident.
A number between 1 to 1.5 tends to be used to calculate general damages. A number as high as five may occasionally be used if the general damages were severe. The idea is that the more severe your special damages are, the greater your general and special medical damages will be. The compensation you receive will cover:
Household services: If you sustained injuries from your accident that forced you to hire someone to take care of you while you were recovering, you would be able to seek economic damages for this from the defendant.
Loss of Consortium: If you lost your loved one or are no longer able to enjoy sexual activities because of your personal injury accident and the related injuries you may be able to get compensation for loss of consortium. You, and not the injured or deceased person, will generally file for damages.
The jury will calculate benefits based on the stability of the relationship, you and your loved one’s average life expectancies, the extent to which the benefits of companionship have been lost, and how much you enjoyed the companionship of the other person.
Loss of Enjoyment of Life: This refers to your decreased ability to enjoy life in the way that you were able to before the accident occurred. For obvious reasons, this is difficult to calculate. Some states refer to and treat this as pain and suffering. Other states refer to and treat this as another type of injury.
Permanent disability: You’ll need medical testimony from a medical expert and a detailed medical exam from your doctor to prove and get damages for this.
Special damages: This is a general category of damages and it includes all medical losses that you have sustained because of your accident. you’ll need to provide detailed proof of your accident and injuries and exactly how much money was involved.