When someone else’s carelessness causes you to suffer injuries, you’re entitled to seek compensation. However, a personal injury event often causes more harm than just medical bills and time missed from work. The way you live and experience life has also likely been impacted, and this impact deserves recognition.
However, determining the appropriate amount of compensation for this sort of injury is challenging. If you seek too much, you might be disappointed with what you ultimately get. At the same time, placing too low a value on your quality of life means you might not obtain the full amount of compensation you deserve.
The amount of compensation you can secure for your pain and suffering or loss of quality of life is unique to your case. However, there are several principles Ohio personal injury lawyers employ when calculating the amount of damages they seek for their clients.
The Purpose of Non-Economic Damages in Personal Injury Cases
Injury victims can generally seek two types of damages in their legal claims.
Economic damages compensate the victim for the financial losses and expenses they incurred due to the accident. Payment for medical bills, lost wages, and property damage all fall under the umbrella of economic damages. Non-economic damages, meanwhile, are meant to reflect intangible injuries and costs.
Unlike hospital expenses or lost wages, there are no invoices, bills, or other objective metrics by which to measure non-economic losses. Instead, it falls to each victim and their personal injury lawyer to prove to the court that the compensation they’re seeking for non-economic losses is warranted.
Components of Your Quality of Life
Claiming that your personal injury accident has negatively impacted your quality of life is making a rather general statement. In the same way, simply stating that you feel pain and suffering isn’t helpful to a judge or jury trying to determine what amount of compensation is appropriate.
Instead, your Columbus personal injury attorney will have you focus on specific experiences that impact your overall quality of life by asking questions like the following:
Are You Experiencing Physical Pain?
Whether it’s a dull ache or a sharp, stabbing pain, the physical sensations of injury are unpleasant at best and debilitating at worst.
The more pronounced your pain is, the greater its impact on your quality of life. Similarly, the more pervasive the pain is, the greater the amount of damages you’d likely need to be compensated adequately.
Has Your Mental Health Suffered?
Physical pain and the limitations it causes can lead some injury victims to experience mental health concerns.
The accident itself can be traumatic, resulting in anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. These conditions can cause you to fear the outside world, distrust others, and have a generally negative outlook on life. Both alone and in combination, these experiences can contribute to a lower quality of life.
The mental harm personal injury accidents cause is most vividly manifested when injury victims turn to alcohol, drugs, or self-harming behaviors as a way to cope with their experiences.
What Activities Can You Not Enjoy Anymore?
Everyone has activities that give their life meaning and joy. Whether it’s spending time with family, traveling, or being in nature, these activities are essential to your well-being and your sense of quality of life.
If an injurious accident takes these activities away from you, your quality of life can suffer. Even if you eventually find new activities, there can be a difficult transition period during which you struggle with a diminished quality of life.
Did Your Accident Have a Lasting Physical Impact?
Scarring and disfigurement that don’t heal with time or treatment can also negatively affect your quality of life. The more prominent the damage, the more likely it is to remind you of the events that left you with it. You might also feel self-conscious about your appearance and withdraw from social life, leading to further anguish.
Caps on Non-Economic Damages in Ohio
Your personal injury lawyer must consider the previous indications of the effects on your quality of life in light of Ohio’s statutory cap on non-economic damages.
Except in certain circumstances, state law caps non-economic damages at $250,000 or three times the amount of your economic losses, whichever is greater. There’s also a cap of $350,000 for non-economic damages per plaintiff.
Proving Non-Economic Damages
Once you and your personal injury lawyer have calculated your entitled compensation, you must provide evidence to back up your claim.
Proving non-economic harm can be tricky due to its subjective nature. Some of the evidence that will be most likely to convince the judge or jury includes:
- Your own experiences
- Statements from friends, family members, coworkers, and neighbors
- Testimony from your counselor or therapist
- Objective evidence that supports any claimed limitations you have, such as video surveillance showing that you no longer drive to work following a car crash
One of the most important steps you can take to support your claim for non-economic damages is to keep a diary or journal after your crash. Use your entries to document your injuries and the recovery process and write about how you’re feeling each day. Describe your emotions and their connection to the losses you’ve suffered.
It’s also crucial to keep your appointments with doctors and therapists. It’s hard to convince the court that your physical and emotional injuries are serious if you don’t make treating them a priority.
When visiting with your treatment providers, be honest with them about your symptoms and progress. While you shouldn’t downplay how you feel, you also don’t want to exaggerate your pain or negative emotions.
You and your personal injury attorney can discuss other ways to bolster your claim of non-economic damages. By retaining dependable legal representation early in your case, you can preserve high-quality evidence of your unseen injuries and losses.
Consult a Personal Injury Lawyer at Schiff & Associates
Securing damages for non-economic losses can be difficult, but it’s essential to your overall recovery.
Even if these damages can’t take your pain away or soothe your mental health struggles, a fair and adequate award can serve to validate your feelings and experiences. It’s a way of acknowledging the harm that’s not so easy to treat.
Schiff & Associates is a dedicated Columbus personal injury law firm that represents clients injured in a variety of accident cases.
Whether you were hurt in a truck collision, a slip and fall, or some other catastrophic accident, our compassionate team can help you pursue the full extent of the damages you’re legally entitled to. Contact us today to learn more about our services.