After filing a lawsuit following a vehicular accident, you may earn damages. How much you can earn depends on the pain and suffering the incident caused. Mental symptoms like depression and scarring, physical aches, handicaps, and disabling conditions qualify as pain and suffering.
The calculations involved in totaling pain and suffering vary by accident type. The best motorcycle accident lawyers understand the factors that contribute to total damages, including the accident’s effect on a client’s livelihood, health, and more. How are pain and suffering calculated in motorcycle accidents?
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What are Pain and Suffering Calculations Like?
A victim’s insurance company, a judge, and a jury examine how an accident affected a person’s life. After totaling the factors, they apply either a multiplier or a per diem calculation to tabulate damages.
For serious accidents, the court and jury decide on a multiplier between 1.5 and 5. Then, they multiply the total monetary losses by that number to award damages. For instance, if the court decided on a multiplier of three, and the victim lost $25,000 due to work losses, medical bills, and a destroyed car, they may earn $75,000 in damages.
For less devastating accidents, the court applies a per diem calculation method. For every day the victim suffers until maximum medical improvement, the court awards an amount of money. Usually, damages tabulated with this method are lower than with a multiplier.
What Factors Contribute to Pain and Suffering Calculations?
The victim’s priority in an accident injury trial is to legally prove that the event damaged their life. To do so, legal officials work with the victim to determine the extent of the defendant’s negligence. They also try to establish the incident’s mental, physical, and monetary repercussions.
Defendant Negligence
The defendant’s negligence is crucial to calculating damages. If the perpetrator of the accident was drunk driving, distracted, or otherwise displaying unsafe behavior, the victim will accrue more damages. Establishing fault is critical to being a victim in a court of law and receiving proper compensation, and victimhood is typically proved by negligence.
Impact on the Victim
Many factors contributing to pain and suffering lie with the defendant’s situation immediately and distantly following the accident. Medical, physical, mental, and livelihood concerns deserve fair consideration as long as they have caused a loss.
Medical Factors
Did you accrue medical bills while treating the effects of the accident? Will your injuries require long healing times that negatively affect your livelihood? Injuries causing an extended prognosis result in higher bills. In a court of law, a victim’s medical treatments, prognosis, and relevant prescription fees contribute to pain and suffering.
Physical Factors
Physical disabilities that inhibit a victim’s life after an accident contributes to pain and suffering. Broken bones, serious injuries, and other conditions that reduce a person’s quality of life for an indefinite or short period are valid physical factors.
The condition of other physical objects, like the victim’s vehicle, may also apply if insured. In the case of a motorcycle accident, the degree to which the victim’s bike is damaged may suggest higher pain and suffering.
Mental Factors
Serious accidents take a toll beyond physical health. Rest assured that depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and other symptoms count as suffering. Mental factors are difficult to quantify, but in correlation with poor physical health and a lack of work, a judge and jury can better assess them.
Livelihood Factors
Finally, the last factors of pain and suffering lie with livelihood. If a victim must take a leave of absence from work or quit due to physical symptoms, mental afflictions, or other reasons following the accident, the court considers it part of pain and suffering. Similarly, a family member’s loss of life, the strain on a marriage, and other livelihood factors also matter.
Conclusion
Motorcycle accidents are more common than you think. Don’t let the statute of limitations run out. If you were part of a motorcycle accident and have suffered, do not wait. Contact Rosenberg and Gluck today.
