The benefits of pursuing a civil claim in the wake of a personal injury accident include your right to demand a settlement for someone else’s negligence. To secure this support, you’re expected to present a court with an estimate of your losses’ value. Our personal injury attorneys help you establish this estimate by adding together your economic and non-economic damages.
What, however, are non-economic damages in a personal injury case? Where your economic damages are billable, not economic damages are considered more theoretical in nature. You can discuss the categorization of your losses as non-economic and the subsequent value of those losses during an initial case consultation.
What Are Non-Economic Damages?
When you come away from a personal injury accident, the losses you suffered aren’t entirely physical. A racing heart, bad dreams, and fear of getting back on your two feet can all be non-economic side effects of someone else’s negligence.
It is in recognition of these losses that New York state allows victims of personal injury accidents to file civil claims demanding that liable parties pay for both the economic and non-economic losses related to an accident. The most common non-economic damages to appear in personal injury cases include:
Pain and Suffering
Accidents that result in personal injury are undeniably painful. Because these accidents stem from someone else’s negligence, you have the right to demand that a liable party acknowledge the pain and undue stress that you’ve had to endure. Your civil claim allows you to include that pain and suffering in your request for financial support.
Wrongful Death
In the tragic case where a personal injury accident results in the untimely passing of someone you love, you have a right to demand compensation for your grief. Not only may the liable party have to contend with funeral expenses, but you can also demand wrongful death compensation. This compensation goes hand-in-hand with loss of consortium and loss of companionship.
The purpose of wrongful death compensation is not to make up for the absence of a loved one in your life. Rather, it stands in for the companionship you’ve lost and the economic support you no longer benefit from. If you are uncomfortable requesting wrongful-death compensation or want to know more about how it may impact your case, you can ask a personal injury lawyer about how it may modify your case’s total value.
Calculating the Value of Non-Economic Damages
When it comes time to calculate the value of your non-economic damages, you don’t have the bills to refer to like you do for economic damages. Instead, our team turns to multipliers approved by the state. We apply these multipliers to the sum of your economic damages to determine what their impact on your case may be.
Estimating your non-economic damages can also be done by comparing your case to similar cases in the past. Either way, the help of a personal injury lawyer is essential for both calculating non-economic damages and retrieving them.
Contact a Personal Injury Lawyer to Calculate Your Non-Economic Damages
The mercurial nature of non-economic damages in a personal injury case can lead some accident survivors to believe that they do not deserve certain forms of compensation. This is never the case. If someone else’s negligence led to your accident, our attorneys will fight to provide you with every avenue through which you might secure post-accident support.
You can discuss the nature of the non-economic damages applicable to your case during an initial consultation with our team. Schedule your case evaluation by calling the Law Office of Cohen & Jaffe, LLP at 516-358-6900 or filling out our contact form. Also, check out and subscribe to the Law Office of Cohen & Jaffe, LLP YouTube Channel for more information about various personal injury cases.
