Compensatory Damages in Personal Injury Cases – PART 3

This is the third and final part of a three part series of articles I am writing on compensatory damages (ie financial compensation) in personal injury claims.   The focus of this article is on income loss damages and what are called ‘special damages’.

Income Loss Damages

It is common for someone who is injured to end up missing time from work.  For many people, missing time from work because of injuries leads directly to lost wages.

For many people, missing even a few days of work can have significant financial consequences, especially if they are raising a family.

The effects of this are far greater if someone if off work for weeks or months as a result of their injuries.  Unfortunately, this is all too common a scenario that I see as a personal injury lawyer.

The goal of pursuing an injury claim is to ultimately recover the lost income as part of the claim, however, sometimes it can take several months or years to resolve a personal injury claim.

It depends on the injuries, how serious they are, how long they persist, etc.  This can mean that as an injured person, you end up having to deal with some difficult times while your claim is being advanced.

Income loss damages are generally separated into past and future income loss claims.

A claim for past income loss is a claim for the income lost up to the date of settlement or trial.

A claim for future income loss (often referred to as future loss of earning capacity) is intended, very generally speaking, to compensate someone for the future impacts that the injuries will have on their ability to earn income (after the claim is resolved).

This can be a much more difficult claim to quantify, however, your lawyer will often work closely with various medical and financial experts in order to quantify this type of claim.

Special Damages

Special damages generally refer to compensation for ‘out-of-pocket’ expenses that you might incur after suffering injuries.  They are damages that are intended to compensate you for quantifiable monetary losses.

In a personal injury claim, you need to keep track of expenses that you incur that are related to the injuries that you suffered in the accident.

These can be more obvious expenses like treatment and medication costs, but they can also include less obvious expenses like parking costs when attending at the hospital or doctor office and mileage expenses to travel to and from treatments.

These costs on their own might seem small, but over many months or years they can add up very quickly and you are entitled to be reimbursed for these expenses.  After all, you would not have incurred them had you not been injured.

This three part series on ‘damages’ was intended to provide very general information on how we, as personal injury lawyers, assess and determine what level of compensation our injured clients are entitled to.

Quantification can be a complicated process and I have only touched on the more basic aspects and the more common types of damages.

There are other damages {00509515;1} that can be pursued, depending on the nature of the claim, including things like future cost of care and ‘in-trust’ compensation.

These are beyond the scope of this series, but if you or someone you know has been injured in a car accident, slip and fall, assault or by a defective product, it is wise to speak with a lawyer who can help determine the nature and extent of damages that you might be able to pursue.

“Greg Pratch is a lawyer and partner with Pushor Mitchell LLP. He practices in the area of litigation with a particular focus on personal injury matters and employment law.”