What Kind of Damages Can I Collect From A Personal Injury Lawsuit?

Hi, I’m Ryan Fisher. I’m a partner here at the firm. I get a lot of clients that ask me, so what can I get if I file a lawsuit or make a claim? What can I get? And the short answer is, I’ll get you everything that I possibly can. But to be a little bit more specific, there are two types of damages in a personal injury case.

There’s actually a lot more than that, but there are two big categories economic damages and non-economic damages. Economic damages are actual out-of-pocket costs, wage loss, and medical bills. If your golf clubs were in the back of the car that got damaged, we can get you the value of the golf clubs. I like to think of economic damages kind of as easy damages.

They have a price tag on them. If you make $1,000 a week and you miss three weeks of work, $3,000. Those are the easy damages to calculate. Whatever your medical bills are, you add them up. And those are your medical damages. The more difficult damages to calculate are the non-economic damages. some people call them pain and suffering damages and pain and suffering damages do comprise some of the non-economic damages.

But there’s other elements to that as well. That is a more gray area. And, I like to tell clients you can take the same case with the same facts and the same parties, and try that case five times, and you’re going to get five different awards from five different juries. There is no book you can look at, like to get the value of a car.

You can go online or look at the blue book value and get pretty close to the value of a car, but there is no book or website you can look at that’s going to tell you how much a broken leg is worth or how much the loss of a limb is worth. It’s different for everybody.

Many years ago, I had a case where I represented a fella who was a concert pianist, and he had a hand injury. So, for instance, a hand injury for a concert pianist could be a disabling injury. Here’s a fella who spent his entire life learning how to be a pianist, and that was taken away from him. Whereas that same injury for a different client who, let’s say is, an accountant or a lawyer,

It’s painful. It has an effect on his life, but it doesn’t take away somebody’s livelihood. So every injury has a different value based on the person who sustained those injuries. We do a lot of scour cases, like in dog bites, in motorcycle accidents and things like that. And, a scar, for instance, on a young female space, can be a devastating type of injury, but a scar on an, I’ll use me, for example, on a 60-year-old male face just isn’t as devastating as a scar on a 19-year-old girl’s face.

So you can’t really compare apples to apples when you’re talking about non-economic damages, because all cases are different. We’ve been doing this for over 50 years. I personally have been doing this for 34 years. I’ve seen thousands of cases. And, we bank on our experiences. Well, I still see things that I’ve never seen before, but the vast majority of cases that come across my desk I’ve seen before so I have a point of reference as to the value of cases.

So, do not rely on an insurance adjuster to tell you how much a case is worth. The insurance adjuster’s goal is to get the case settled quickly and get it settled for as little money as possible. And their job is not to educate you or be fair with you, or tell you the reasonable value of your case, which is why you need experienced lawyers like us on your side to help you value a case and get you what you deserve.

If you have any questions, if you think you have a case, please give us a call here at the firm. We’ll be glad to listen to you and tell you what we think. Thank you.

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