Hi, my name is Matt Eason, and in this video, we’re going to talk about recoverable damages in a car accident or personal injury case. I’ve been practicing personal injury law here in Sacramento for over 25 years.
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It’s not uncommon for us to receive an inquiry sent to us through the internet asking questions along the line of, “How do I get the most from a car accident? How do I maximize what I should receive?” And while those are fair questions, the better question, the better way to look at it is what are you entitled to under the law to make sure that you properly compensated for your loss.
From a very big picture, when you’re involved in a car accident, you’re entitled to recover for all the damages for how your life has changed. But how do you categorize that, compartmentalize that, or explain that to the judge or jury? The basic way we do it is we break things down into two different categories: economic damages and non-economic damages.
Economic damages were historically relatively straightforward. They’re the type of damages that an accountant could put a pencil to. Such as how much have your past medical expenses been? How much are your future medical expenses? Wage loss in the past and wage loss in the future. Things like that. While it may seem simple to calculate, the facts giving rise to it may be very complex. Was your loss of work related to this accident or related to something else? Is your loss of work in the future? Is it going to be short term, long term, mid-term? Is it speculative? It’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen. Those are all the kinds of questions we can help you with. Theoretically, with economic damages, you’re entitled to all of your loss of earnings from the past and future, as well as all your medical expenses from the past and future.
Depending on the amount of economic damages that might be in play, sometimes it’s important to hire expert witnesses. It’s not uncommon for us to bring a doctor in or a hospital staff member to help us categorize and explain the cost of future medical care. Likewise, it’s not uncommon to bring a vocational rehabilitation person that might look at your work history. Help us explain to a judge, jury, and claims adjuster how much income you’re going to lose or how you can replace that income, what’s not going to be replaced. So while it seems simple to say that your loss of income is this, or your medical bills are that, we often have to rely on very qualified experts to help us prove that.
The second category of damages we talk about is, quite frankly, the art of the practice of law, and it’s trying to come up with the number and value for the non-economic damages. There is no formula for determining pain and suffering. There is no fixed standard. There’s no reference book. Everybody’s threshold for pain is different. Everybody’s pain is different. It’s left to the wisdom of the judge and jury to determine what they believe is reasonable. As lawyers, our job is to help paint the picture accurately, completely to the judge and jury so they have an understanding and empathy for what you’ve gone through may have to go through.
There was a point in time 20 to 30 years ago in which we used to have a formula based on the medical bills as to what your theoretical pain and suffering was. It was often three times to five times your medical bills. The problem with that formula in the current era is that medical bills are so varied. You can have one trip to the hospital, charge one person $20,000 and the exact same trip, charge a different person $3000 based on their insurance coverage or lack thereof. Therefore to assume that their case or personal injury value or pain and suffering value is worth a multiplier of each of those numbers is wrong.
In addition to the disparate issues over medical bills, not all pain is the same, or disfigurements are the same. You could have a young person with a scar on her face and say she only had $500 in medical bills. Therefore she should get three or four times that back in pain and suffering and disfigurement would be completely unjust. Likewise, you can have a salty old farmer who’s got wrinkled skin from being in the sun nonstop for years and years and years and have the same scar in the same place. He’s not entitled to the same amount of damages as the younger person is who didn’t have that type of prior skin condition. So when looking at the value and suffering, you have to look at the people involved, not just the money spent or the medical bills.
Having handled thousands of cases over the last 25 years, we have a very good understanding in our office that we know exactly what someone’s case is worth and what a hypothetical judge or jury thinks its value is. That helps us make sure we get that amount of money or, hopefully, even better from the insurance companies responsible.
If you’re wondering what the value of your car accident case is, you should be because unless you’ve been down this road hundreds of thousands of times, it’s really difficult to determine what the value actually is. If you’ve been involved in a car accident or otherwise have a negligence claim against somebody, and you want to know the value and maybe want to get some help. I hope you’ll reach out to me. My name is Matt Eason. I’m with the law firm of Eason & Tambornini.
