Personal Injury Available Damages

Answer:

Damages for personal injury claims in Florida are multifaceted. There’s first what’s called economic damages, dollars and cents damages, those things you can plug into a computer and it spits out a number. For example, your medical bills, your medical expenses, what you had to pay for that care and treatment that you had to endure through no fault of your own. Also things like wage loss, if you missed work as a result of the incident, you also would have lost out upon money that would have made its way into your pocketbook. What we do is work through you and your employer to put together the right documentation to show the amount of wages that you actually lost as a result of the accident and your injuries.

We also have economic expenses in the future, medical expenses that reasonably certain will be incurred as a result of your care and treatment. Injuries, a lot of times, more times than not, are permanent in nature. They’re not going to go away and get better. They’re going to be things that you are going to have to deal with for the remainder of your years. Those future costs of medical care and treatment are damages that we look to seek for you as well, as well as what’s called a loss of future earning capacity, the way you went about making money in the past, your work history, if you will, if that’s been affected and you can’t make money that same way as a result of your injuries and the ongoing issues that you’re going to suffer into the future, that’s an economic claim of damages as well. Economic claims also include things like out of pocket expenses, if you’ve had to hire folks to maintain your yard, to maintain your house while you’re laid up and unable to do so. Other out of pocket type expenses, medical devices, prescriptions, things that you have to pay for out of your own pocket, those are all economic expenses as well.

In Florida, there’s also something called non-economic damages. Those non-economic damages are loosely termed pain and suffering and they certainly include those two elements, the pain and the suffering that you’ve had to endure as a result of what you’ve had to go through. What they also include are things like inconvenience, how your life has been interrupted, what this has meant for you in missing out on other things in your daily activities that have been important and that you’ve been unable to fulfill as a result of your injuries. They also include things like mental anguish and distress. It’s a certainly trying time working your way back from an injury trying to get back to what you know to be now a new normal, which is never going to be the old normal. What it does is it weighs on you heavily and that’s an element of damage that we can look to fulfill as well.

Finally, including things like the loss of the capacity for the enjoyment of life, those activities, those hobbies, those things and interests that you have that have all been negatively affected as a result of your injuries and your ongoing pain and discomfort. At Goldstein Buckley Cechman, Rice & Purtz, we not only work to document those economic damages, those dollars and cents damages, but we also work hard and closely with you to get to know you, who you were before the accident, how the accident has affected you, so that we can go about putting together the right framework to make sure you recover not only those economic damages but those non-economic damages that we just discussed as well.