What Damages Am I Entitled To Recover?
Personal Injury Lawyer
If you’ve been injured in an accident, you might be entitled to compensation for your injuries. When it comes to a personal injury case, there are two different types of damages: economic and noneconomic damages. Economic damages include financial losses or out-of-pocket expenses that directly result from the accident. Noneconomic damages include things like a decrease in the quality of your life or pain and suffering.
Economic Damages
Economic damages are also sometimes called special damages. They are suffered by the victim as a direct result of their injury. Economic damages are easy to put a dollar figure on because there is usually a paper trail of some sort. Here are some examples of common economic damages:
- Medical bills; current, past, and future
- Wages lost as a result of the accident
- The loss of future earnings and job opportunities
- The cost of the loss of property, or property damage
- The cost of repairs to the damaged property
Noneconomic Damages
Noneconomic damages include things that are largely intangible and are not easy to put a dollar amount on. For example, it’s hard to quantify things like emotional or psychological trauma, or pain and suffering. Those things may affect different people in different ways, so there’s no formula to come up with an amount. Some examples of common noneconomic damages include:
- Pain and suffering, both past and future
- Disability
- Emotional distress
- Loss of consortium (companionship)
- A decrease in quality of life
Some states may also allow punitive damages to be awarded in personal injury cases. Punitive damages are meant to punish the offender who caused the injury and to prevent a recurrence of the same thing happening again.
Types of Personal Injury Cases
There are two types of personal injury cases; intentional and negligence. An intentional tort is when someone causes injury to a victim willingly and on purpose. In certain cases, willful negligence and ignorance may also fall under intentional tort.
A negligence tort, however, is the most common type of personal injury case. These are cases where a person or party owed the victim a duty of care and that duty was breached by their actions, resulting in your injury. An example of something like this might be a car accident. Although one person is generally at fault for the accident, most car accidents are not willful acts done on purpose.
If you have been injured as the result of someone else’s negligence or willful action, it’s a good idea to get in contact with an experienced personal injury lawyer, like a teen accident lawyer in Trenton, New Jersey, right away.
Thank you to the experts at Davis & Brusca for their input into personal injury, teen accidents, and the law.
