After watching Hot Coffee, I wondered what the most common things people claimed for accident damages, and after reading the ones that were harder to quantify, I looked into how people did quantify them monetarily.
Easy to Quantify
Medical Treatment: compensation for the cost of the medical care associated with the accident.
Income: compensation for an accident's effect on your salary (including both the money you lost and the money you will lose as a result of the injury).
Property Loss: vehicles, clothing, and other personal items damaged as a result of the accident.
Hard to Quantify
Pain & Suffering: compensation for any pain or discomfort experienced during or in the immediate aftermath of the accident as well as any ongoing pain associated with the accident.
Emotional Distress: compensation for the psychological effect of the accident on the person including fear, anxiety, and sleep loss.
Loss of Enjoyment: compensation for accident-caused injuries keeping you from hobbies, exercise, and other recreational activities.
Loss of Consortium: compensation for accident-caused injuries impacting a plaintiff's relationship with their spouse.
The 2 Methods For Quantifying
1. take the easy to quantify things such as the cost of medical bills, income loss, and property loss, add them together, and multiply by a number between 1 and 5 (based on injury severity), to get, say, the Pain and Suffering compensation.
2. pick a certain number and charge that amount for each day of recovery from the day of the accident to the day of full recovery.
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ReplyDeleteI thought this was interesting to look at how to calculate a person's damages for personal injury after an accident. I looked at damages definitions too and noticed that the easy-to-quantify damages are called "special damages," when these seem straightforward, not "special." These are the ones like medical expenses and lost earnings that you could produce a receipt for, or document with records. Then, the hard-to-quantify damages are called "general" damages, the ones that you would never have a receipt to prove. These seem very hard to determine and lawyers would probably advise clients to push this number as high as possible. Sometimes, such as with very serious injuries, I think that is appropriate because the easy-to-measure costs from an injury (medical bills, lost earnings, etc.) will be much less than the loss of enjoyment of a person's life or their emotional distress due to their injuries. For example, if someone crashes into someone's car because they were not paying attention, and the accident victim becomes completely paralyzed, that can destroy the person's life beyond what their medical bills, lost wages, and damaged car, etc. will reflect. Still, I think it would be hard to come up with a rational number. We saw other cases of high general damages beyond special damages, such as in the MacDonalds' hot coffee case.
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