Bringing a personal injury claim is important after you’ve been hurt in an accident or due to the negligence of someone else. Your claim is the way that you get reimbursement for everything you’ve lost: but getting full reimbursement isn’t a given. A lot of things can affect the value of your claim, and talking with a personal injury lawyer in Katy, TX is the best way to ensure you get everything you deserve.
What Factors Affect the Value of a Personal Injury Claim?
Your Degree of Fault
Texas has a modified comparative fault rule that allows you to recover damages even if you’re partially at fault, so long as you are not more at fault than the other party. In a two-person car accident, this would mean you are 50% or less at fault.
Your final compensation will typically be reduced by the same percentage as your fault, however. If you are 40% at fault, for example, you would only be able to recover 60% of your total damages. You can see then just how important it is that you properly calculate the full total of your damages. If you miss anything, that loss is multiplied as your final total gets cut to compensate for your fault (if you bear any fault). Even more importantly, you must not be given more fault than you actually deserve for the accident.
You should expect that insurance companies and even other drivers may do everything possible to increase your fault. Every percentage point that the insurance company can push over onto you is one percent less that they have to pay. If you have significant damages, this can translate into thousands of dollars. A personal injury lawyer with extensive experience in these claims will be your best defense against inappropriate blame.
The Amount of Your Medical Bills and Other Economic Damages
In these cases, the medical bills are often the biggest single expense, but any losses that you can quantify with the receipt or a bill, such as the repair of a vehicle or damage to personal property like a phone, will all count in your economic damages. The higher these are, the higher the total claim tends to be, not just because of the dollar amount of your economic damages but because other damages are calculated with reference to the total of your economic damages. The higher your economic damages, the higher your non-economic damages in most cases.
Your economic damages need to include not just the obvious things, but also some not-so-obvious ones. This is one of the reasons it’s so important to have a lawyer help you calculate your total. You obviously want to include your medical bills from your visit to the ER and initial treatment, but you also need to include all follow-up treatment, prescription medication costs, physical therapy, etc. You also should include things like the cost of taxi rides to get to doctors’ appointments if your own car was damaged in the accident or if you could not drive because of your injuries. If you had to hire lawn care or childcare to keep up with your responsibilities because you were injured, this should all be included, as well.
Your lost wages are also included in your economic damages, and these can also be tricky to calculate. Not only should you calculate for all the hours you couldn’t work normally, but you should also be reimbursed if you normally took overtime hours and those hours were available while you were injured, and the only reason you were unable to take them was your injury. If you lost paid time off, personal or vacation days that you had accrued, or bonuses, those may all be considered, as well.
The Extent of Your Injuries
The extent of your injuries matters in two ways. First, the worse the injuries, the greater your medical bills tend to be. That’s fairly obvious, but the other reason your injuries are important is that calculating your non-economic damages depends on understanding the extent of your suffering. Non-economic damages, often known as pain and suffering, are damages meant to reimburse you for the intangible losses you’ve suffered, such as pain, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, etc. It’s difficult to put a number on these sorts of losses.
The most common way of calculating your non-economic damages is to multiply the total of your economic damages by a number between one and five. The more extensive your injuries, the higher that number will be. For example, if you had some minor fractures that healed quickly and without complications after a car accident, you might only multiply your economic damages by one. But if the accident paralyzed you or caused you permanent brain damage, you would likely multiply your economic damages by five. Everything else falls somewhere in between those two extremes.
The Other Party’s Insurance
Another major factor in the total amount you’ll be able to collect for your personal injury claim is the other party’s insurance and their insurance limits. Even if all your damages easily run to $500,000, if the insurance company only covers the responsible party up to $300,000, you likely won’t be able to go beyond this limit. There are a few things to explore here, and a good lawyer will know how to help you do so.
For example, if the responsible party has some personal assets that are not exempt from civil lawsuits, you may be able to get the court to require them to use these assets to reimburse you personally. A lot of key, foundational property, such as the family home, necessary vehicles, and a certain amount of other personal property, is exempt from any lawsuit of this type, but in some cases the responsible party may have valuable assets that can be sold to cover your losses.
Another possibility for reimbursement is if there are several people partially at fault in the accident. If you were not at fault, or if you hold only a small degree of fault, you may be able to collect reimbursement from several insurance companies.
The Skill of Your Personal Injury Lawyer in Katy, TX
One of the biggest factors in your total claim will be working with the right lawyer. If your lawyer has extensive experience in the Texas courts and understands Texas law well, this is going to be a benefit to you.
An experienced lawyer will have argued cases like this in the courtroom and won, but they will also have gotten good settlements for clients at the negotiating table. It’s important to look for a lawyer who is specifically skilled and experienced in personal injury law, since there are many branches of law. A lawyer who is brilliant at contract law, for instance, may not be able to achieve impressive results for you in personal injury (and vice versa).
If you’ve been injured by the negligence of someone else, you deserve to have compensation for everything you’ve lost. Get the help of an experienced, award-winning Katy, TX lawyer by contacting the Law Office of Shane McClelland, PLLC, today in Katy or Sugar Land for a free consultation on your case.
