Hellertown has a lot of shops, businesses, homes, restaurants, and workplaces – all some of the most common places you might face injuries. If someone else was responsible for your injury, we can fight to get compensation from them.
When suing an individual or business, their insurance often pays for your damages. This might make you think an insurance claim is enough to get compensation, but insurance companies often need a looming lawsuit to pressure them into paying what they owe you.
For a free review of your potential injury case, call our personal injury lawyers at The Reiff Law Firm at (215) 709-6940.
What Type of Compensation Can I Get for an Injury Claim?
Injury cases involve two major areas of “compensatory damages” to pay you back for harms you faced:
- Economic damages pay for medical bills, lost earnings, property damage, and other incidental expenses caused by your accident.
- Non-economic damages pay you back for the physical, emotional, and mental effects of an injury and are often grouped together as “pain and suffering.”
In any injury case, it is vital to get both covered in full. Insurance companies might try to leave off non-economic damages and focus only on damages you can prove to them with bills and appraisals.
Sometimes insurance claims even leave out these damages. For example, car insurance claims are usually filed with your own insurance if you have a limited tort policy. In those claims, you cannot get pain and suffering, and you need to talk to a lawyer about whether you can sue for pain and suffering in the first place.
Other Damages in Personal Injury Claims
The damages discussed above are all “compensatory” in that they pay you back for the harm you suffered. In some cases, you can get additional “punitive damages” to punish the defendant for their actions.
Instead of being based on how serious the harm was, punitive damages are based on how bad the defendant’s actions were. The value needs to be high enough to punish the defendant, which also means looking into how much they can afford to pay in many cases.
If your case involves the kind of reckless, intentional, or seriously dangerous actions that can lead to punitive damages, we may be able to claim much higher damages for you.
How Much is My Claim Worth?
It is impossible to calculate damages in your case without assessing the following evidence and other records:
- Medical bills
- Pay stubs
- Tax records
- Bank statements
- Medical assessments of your ability to work going forward
- Estimates of future medical costs
- Financial reports on future lost earnings
- Medical records
- Psychiatric evaluations
Not all of these will be needed in every case, but these are the kinds of evidence we need to determine the value of your economic and non-economic damages.
Economic damages are calculated using bills and other records, and financial experts can estimate future costs. However, non-economic damages have their own calculation methods.
How Much is My Pain and Suffering Worth in a Hellertown Injury Case?
“Pain and suffering” is often used interchangeably with “non-economic damages” to cover all of these kinds of damages:
- Physical pain
- Discomfort
- Mental suffering
- Emotional distress
- Mental anguish
- Fear of reinjury
- Reliving the accident and PTSD symptoms
- Depression and anxiety about your injury
- Lost abilities
- Distressing changes to appearance after facial injuries
- Embarrassment from the accident.
Unlike economic damages, there are no bills or statements you can point to. However, we can often calculate these damages through two methods:
Per Diem Method
Using your daily income level as a starting point, we can calculate how much your pain and suffering is worth each day. If you have already fully recovered and your pain and suffering is over, this gives us a number of days to multiply that value by.
For more serious injuries, we adjust the per-day cost upward.
Multiplier Method
Alternatively, we can choose a number between 1.5 and 5 to represent how serious your injury and pain and suffering were. Then, we can multiply your economic damages by that value to get your non-economic damages.
More serious injury cases use a higher multiplier, potentially doubling or tripling your economic damages.
This method works well for open-ended injuries where you continue to face ongoing pain and suffering.
Common Accident Cases We Handle
Our lawyers can handle injury cases in any of these fields and more:
- Car accidents
- Truck accidents
- Motorcycle accidents
- Property injuries/premises liability
- Product injuries
- Slip and falls
- Work injuries
- Wrongful death.
How Do You Prove Fault in a Personal Injury Case in Hellertown?
Personal injury cases require sufficient evidence to prove each “element” of your case. Most injury cases are based on negligence, which has four elements to prove, and the evidence is “sufficient” if it meets the “preponderance of the evidence” standard.
Elements
A successful injury claim requires proving that the defendant 1) owed you a duty and 2) breached that duty. You must also show that 3) the breach caused your injuries and 4) you suffered damages the court can order compensation for.
An example of this is a truck driver speeding through a stop sign and hitting you. There, they violated the duty to stop at stop signs, causing your crash.
Another example is a store owner failing to shovel their sidewalk. If it still is not cleared days after the snowfall, that is unreasonable and a violation of local ordinances. If you slipped and fell on ice, that would be their fault.
Your injuries and economic damages satisfy the last element in most cases.
Burden of Proof
Proving your case “by a preponderance of the evidence” means showing it is more likely than not that these elements are all met and that the defendant was at fault.
Meeting this burden requires evidence, such as the following:
- Your testimony
- Eyewitness testimony
- Expert testimony
- Security camera video
- Photos of the injury/accident scene
- Proof of damages
Call Our Hellertown Injury Attorneys Today
If you were hurt, call The Reiff Law Firm’s Hellertown personal injury lawyers at (215) 709-6940 today.
