Calculating Damages based on the Impact of a Personal Injury on our Clients

Описание: BoatLaw, LLP Partner Nick Neidzwski dives deeper into the subject of calculating damages based on the impact of a personal injury.
Our law firm proudly serves clients up and down the West Coast of the U.S.A., including in Washington, Oregon, California, and Alaska. Call 1-800-BOATLAW today for more information.

Transcription:

"In any personal injury case, our client is our greatest resource. We take the time to spend time with them in their home; to spend time with them with their families and their co-workers. We want to understand who they are and who they used to be before an incident and we take this time because it is critical for damages for any case to understand how our client was impacted in every facet of their life from an incident, and in spending time with our clients we get an understanding of what type of income they used to earn. We get an understanding of what they love to do with their family; we get an understanding of who they were as a person -- what activities they like to do, what sports they like to do. So we can describe the impact that a personal injury incident made on their life. We describe that impact to a judge, a jury, a mediator, opposing counsel, to maximize our clients' recovery.

There are several categories of damages in most personal injury cases. One is medical expenses. Oftentimes, medical expenses can be daunting. You can be receiving bill after bill from different hospitals. Those are expenses that we seek to recover in your lawsuit. You may not be able to return to your job prior to the injury. This is called loss of earning capacity or lost wages. We seek lost wages from the point in time of the incident through present date, and we also seek loss of earning capacity from the present day through your future working life expectancy. And in doing so we look at your trajectory. We look at your age, we look at what kind of job you had, what you earned in the past, what you expected to earn in the future, what your career goals were, where did you want to be in five years, where did you want to be in 10 years, and now where do you have to be because of the incident. What kind of training do you have to go through now because of the incident, do you need to retrain yourself in a different vocation, do you need to go back to college, do you need to go back to trade school, do you need to learn how to work in an office when your entire career was outside of an office... we look at those factors. We look at that impact so we can describe to anyone, whether it be a judge, a jury, a mediator, or opposing counsel, the impact that an incident has had on your life. We also look at general pain and suffering -- your general loss of enjoyment of life. We look at your medical treatment that you needed to incur because of an incident. Maybe you needed to go through one surgery, or multiple surgeries -- all of these factors are relevant to putting a number on your pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life."


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