Pain & Suffering In A Personal Injury Case
Michael Babboni
Personal Injury
When you have personal injury case, and take on the guidance of a motorcycle attorney, slip and fall lawyer or other kind of accident lawyer, the goal is take someone else to court and make them pay for their carelessness or negligence. While an accidental injury is not something that can a person can go to jail for, that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be some kind of punishment involved. A personal injury case is a way to levy that punishment in the form of a financial burden that is placed on the person responsible.But no two personal injury cases are alike, and the circumstances and amounts of money involved in a personal injury case vary wildly from case to case. A slip and fall injury for a senior citizen at a retail outlet or other public space, for example, is going to be different from someone inflicted with a traumatic brain injury. And a child drowning in a swimming pool is a completely different case from someone receiving a broken arm on a faulty amusement park attraction.
When you get together with your St. Pete lawyer to discuss the particulars of your case, one of the important things your lawyer will do for you is work through assessing just how much money is at stake in your case. One of the factors that is involved in coming up with a final figure to go to court with is pain and suffering.
More Complicated Than It Sounds
While the words “pain and suffering” themselves are pretty easy for anyone to understand, the actual legal process behind “attaching a price tag” to these two words can be very complex. In many cases, a person being sued isn’t actually going to be the one paying the amounts of money involved a personal injury case, his or her insurance company will usually be handling that aspect.
The amount of money settled on in a personal injury case is about more than just whatever medical bills are involved, or lost salary due to the inability to work. Other factors, such as future, permanent medical bills, or the permanent loss of the ability to work may also be considerations depending on the severity of an injury, and if a death was involved, that’s an entirely different level.
Into all of this, the actual pain and suffering that a person experiences needs to be addressed. This is far from a straightforward proposition, since it’s not about just settling medical bills, or other financial obligations. Setting a price on pain and suffering is the court’s way to attempt to compensate a victim for the level to which their life has been worsened. It is a “financial apology” of sorts to try to make up for real pain, and the drop in quality of life that comes with it.
In earlier times, one process simply called for multiplying existing factors by three to arrive at a pain and suffering figure. So if medical treatment cost $2000, and one month of salary was $2000, then the combined cost, $4000, multiplied by three, would mean pain and suffering was pegged at $12000.
These days there are many more factors and considerations to work out, which is why a St. Pete lawyer is essential for arriving at an accurate figure. If you have a personal injury case that you want resolved, contact us now and we’ll work together with you to arrive at a satisfactory legal conclusion.