If you were involved in a car accident and suffered a financial loss, you may be wondering how much you can get in court for a personal injury lawsuit. Here are the factors that will help determine the amount of money that you receive.
Medical Bills
One of the biggest factors in an injury lawsuit will be your past and future medical bills. While anybody can add up all of the medical bills they currently received, the challenge is estimating all of those future medical bills. It's not a number that is just pulled out of the air since it requires the help of a lawyer to estimate how much those bills will be.
Estimating medical bills requires that you look at previous cases that are similar to your injury, which will give you an idea of the total cost of the injury and the duration of the recovery. This can be used for a justification as to why you are asking for the amount of money that you requested, even though you have bills that you have not received yet. You don't want to make the mistake of not asking for enough money to cover those medical expenses since you can't ask for more after you receive a settlement.
Lost Wages
You should also consider all of your lost wages that result from being injured. You likely had time that you needed to take off of work to recover from the initial injury, but there will also be future lost wages from attending doctors appointments and things of that nature.
Many people wrongfully assume that they cannot recover lost wages if they do not actually lose wages from their employer. This is often the case when people have a salaried job and use sick days and PTO days for medical appointments. Even though using these days will not cost you money, they are earned days that you lose due to your injury. You can recover that time as lost wages since you can no longer use them for other reasons.
Pain and Suffering
Calculating pain and suffering can be difficult, but it largely depends on the degree of the injury. A long recovery period and ongoing medical treatment can result in receiving a high amount for pain and suffering. Suffering a permanent injury to any degree can also result in receiving more pain and suffering damages. Much like with future medical bills, your lawyer can help estimate pain and suffering damages through previous cases.
To learn more about car accident law, contact a law firm today.