How to efficiently evaluate compensatory damages in a personal injury case

How to Efficiently Evaluate Compensatory Damages in a Personal Injury Case?

When calculating compensatory damages, medical chart review and patient evaluations become very important.

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Personal injury cases involve medical chart review which helps prove the nature and intensity of the injury, based on which compensatory damages are determined for the plaintiff. In any personal injury case, the discovery process is the way in which the required information is gathered by the parties involved in the case. Personal injury lawyers can improve their discovery by efficiently evaluating the actual compensatory damages that may be awarded.

In personal injury cases, compensatory damages can be: ➢

Lost earnings/earnings capacity

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Lost value of household services

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Life care plan costs

The damages discovery must be based on these above categories to ensure that better information is obtained to compute the actual loss. When earnings capacity is calculated, the sustainable realistic earnings of an individual over his/her earnings horizon are taken into account. The important consideration is the difference between the amount of money the injured person could have reasonably expected to earn until retirement if he/she had not been injured, and the amount of money the injured person will now be likely to earn, with any temporary or permanent work limitations.

How can this be pragmatically estimated? Here, a person’s actual past earnings before the injury occurred becomes an important factor. A person who earned steady amounts in the years before the injury occurred can reasonably expect to earn the same amount in the years to come as well. The problem is that the earnings of many people are not consistent for a number of reasons. In some other cases, past earnings may not reasonably provide a reliable basis to calculate future earnings capacity – take the case of a child who is injured, or when the injured party is a stay-at-home parent, a student, or someone just into their 20s.

In such instances, compensatory damages may be

calculated on the basis of other facts and information that may not be case specific, but instead based on statistics.

Where can you obtain details regarding a person’s historic or past earnings? ➢

Tax records, employment records, W-2 earnings statements, and Social Security records can provide valuable information.

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A plaintiff who has fastidiously kept all tax records and supporting documentation of his/her earnings both before and after the injury will be able to provide the required information.

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(800) 670 2809

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In case this is not possible, you can request W-2 statements, paystub information, payroll records, and tax transcripts from employers and the IRS (Internal Revenue Service).

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A quicker way of obtaining evidence regarding a plaintiff’s actual historic earnings is by asking him/her to sign up for an account on the Social Security website, get their account verified, and take a print out of their annual earnings history.

Cases where the injured party’s earnings history is inconsistent for some reason or other are more challenging. Then the person’s sustainable earnings capacity will have to be calculated considering all the relevant information available.

When calculating compensatory damages, the next important step is to determine the lost or impacted work-life expectancy of the injured person. ➢

The best way to estimate potential losses is by basing the calculation on statistical work-life expectancy data available regarding cohort groups that share similar characteristics with the injured person in terms of gender, education, and age and workforce involvement.

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Calculations should also include fringe benefits that may be lost if a person loses employment. These include employer contributions to retirement plans and employer payments towards healthcare insurance premiums. This information should be obtained during the compensatory damages discovery process. The cost of health insurance may be shared between the employee and employer, and these costs can vary considerably. It is important to discover costs and employer contribution amounts when they are relevant to a particular case and is readily available.

Now we come to the next category of economic loss – loss of economically valuable household services/activities that the injured person will not be able to provide anymore.

These include cooking, cleaning, work in the yard and so on. Though no money may be transacted in these instances, these activities have an economic value and there is a potential loss of value when you can’t engage in them. The loss in this case is calculated by multiplying the lost hours of services by a market value rate typically determined by the average rate of wages in jobs such as maids, landscapers, cooks and so on, available from the Occupational Employment Statistics published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Next are life care plan costs that include past and future costs for the required care such as physician visits, diagnostic testing, medications, therapies, equipment, facility care, home care and so on. These can amount to millions of dollars and be more than the loss of earnings capacity in the case of severely injured plaintiffs. To calculate these costs, medical chart review and patient evaluations become necessary.

Considering the above factors when calculating compensatory damages will help attorneys to improve discovery and provide better results for their clients.

www.mosmedicalrecordreview.com

(800) 670 2809