How Are Personal Injury Settlements Calculated?

Personal injury settlements can be tricky to calculate. If you’ve never done this before, it’s easy to make a mistake and miss out on compensation you’re owed, so talk to a personal injury attorney in Long Island as soon as you can to make sure your claim includes everything it should.

Calculating “Economic” Damages

The first type of damages that you can claim in a personal injury case is reimbursement for all the expenses you’ve had. These are known as your “economic damages.” One of the key expenses here is usually your medical bills. If you’ve been injured by someone’s negligence, you should be reimbursed for all treatment that’s related to that injury.

You should also be reimbursed for any lost income you had because you weren’t able to work. If you work a salaried job and had to use your personal days or sick days, you should be reimbursed for the value of those. If you work an hourly job, you should be reimbursed the wages you lost. If any of your property was damaged, such as a mobile phone or a car, you should be reimbursed for those things. And if you had to lay out extra expenses to deal with your injury, such as hiring childcare because you weren’t able to take care of your children while you recovered, this should all be included in your economic damages.

Calculating “Non-Economic” Damages

Next, you should be reimbursed for your pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and other things that are called in the law “non-economic damages.” Most of the time, these are calculated either by multiplying the total of your economic damages by a number between one and five (depending on how bad your injuries were), or by assigning a specific dollar amount to each day you suffered and multiplying that by the number of days it took you to fully recover.

Your lawyer will tell you the best method for calculating these damages and help you do it well. You’ll need to be able to justify these numbers, so you will need things like therapy records, the testimony of family or workmates about your mental state, or possibly your own journal or diary entries.

Calculating Punitive Damages & Comparative Negligence

Most personal injury cases don’t qualify for punitive damages, but your lawyer can tell you if yours might. These are designed to punish the responsible party, and they only apply in cases where someone was wildly reckless or deliberately tried to injure another person.

Your lawyer will also help you calculate your degree of fault. Under New York law, your total damages will be reduced by the same percentage as your fault in the incident, so it’s important to have a lawyer calculating your claim to make sure you don’t miss out on anything more than necessary.

For help in calculating your claim, call Miller, Montiel & Strano in Garden City, NY for a free consultation. We serve Long Island and all of Nassau County.

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