The Types of Damages in a Personal Injury Claim
In the aftermath of a personal injury, the road to recovery can be filled with physical, emotional, and financial challenges. During this trying time, the legal recourse of filing a personal injury claim can provide a beacon of hope, offering the possibility of financial compensation to help rebuild your life.
However, to navigate the complex world of personal injury claims successfully, you should understand the various types of damages that you can seek in such cases. Discover the different damages available to victims seeking redress for their losses.
Economic Damages
Economic damages are the monetary expenses sustained by the person injured due to negligence. This includes reimbursements for damaged property and personal expenses like healthcare expenses and income loss.
The most frequent category of economic damages is medical bills. The responsible party should provide full compensation for all reasonable medical expenses incurred by the victim due to the accident. This might encompass the price of prescription drugs, healthcare supplies, equipment for treatment, and bills from physicians, hospitals, physiotherapists, and other healthcare professionals.
The responsible party should also compensate the injured person for the wages lost due to the injury. This can include pay, benefits, bonus payments, commissions, and income from self-employment. Even compensation for potential future income losses may be available to victims who sustain lifelong disability.
In a property damage claim, plaintiffs might seek compensation for the cost of repairs or the item’s worth, if it was a total loss.
In-home healthcare expenses, travel costs for doctor visits, automobile or house modifications due to a disability, and the price of specialized medical gear or prosthetics might all fall under this category. The plaintiff must maintain thorough records of all expenditures to ensure that the settlement demand includes all monetary losses.
Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages are losses that victims endure due to a mishap or harm that are difficult to quantify financially. These damages may result from physical discomfort, emotional suffering, mental agony, and a reduced sense of life’s quality.
Damages for pain and suffering compensate for the emotional despair or mental agony and the physical anguish and discomfort resulting from the accident or injury. Accident-related permanent disabilities and impairments can hurt an individual’s standard of life. An illustration of such a situation would be if a person lost their freedom and ability to enjoy activities because of spinal cord damage they got in a motorcycle accident.
Punitive Damages
Punitive damages are monetary judgments given to a victim of an injury or another plaintiff by a court of law or other tribunal that penalizes a defendant for a particularly severe or unlawful act.
Punitive damages make a public demonstration of the offender to influence future behavior and teach other parties what to expect from the defendant’s conduct. Punitive damages differ from compensatory penalties, which aim to make the injured party whole and compensate them for their financial losses.
Punitive damages are usually only awarded when the plaintiff can show that the respondent acted particularly maliciously, willfully, or recklessly. This implies that the defendant must have engaged in conduct that was not only reprehensible in disregarding the plaintiff’s welfare but also had malicious intent to harm. Punitive damages may be appropriate for drunk driving collisions, assault-related injuries, and nursing home maltreatment.
To prevent overly harsh punishment of the defendant, the court may only award punitive damages after determining that compensatory damages are insufficient. Additionally, the plaintiff must provide clear and persuasive evidence to support their claim for punitive damages, which often calls for a higher threshold of evidence than in typical civil cases.
Contact us at Carl L Britt, Jr, for legal representation in personal injury cases in Cumberland County, NC, and surrounding regions.