Seeking Justice: Legal Remedies for Slip and Fall Accident Victims
If you slip and fall on someone else’s property, you may be entitled to compensation for accident-related economic damages. However, the damages you can recover for your slip and fall accident depend on the details of your case, the severity of your injuries, and the losses you’ve incurred.
To recover the total value of your case, you’ll need to prove the property owner’s or operator’s negligence and the damages you’ve incurred. A slip and fall lawyer can help you collect evidence, calculate damages, build a strong case, and negotiate with the insurance company to receive maximum compensation for your injuries.
Legal Remedies for Slip and Fall Accident Victims
If you make a claim against a property owner and prove that their negligence caused your slip and fall accident, you’ll be compensated for the following:
Economic Damages
These refer to the financial losses you’ve incurred from your accident injuries. Economic damages can include out-of-pocket expenses and bills you receive from third parties. Economic damages in slip and fall cases include:
1. Medical Costs
Typically, medical expenses make up the most significant part of slip-and-fall accident claims. You’re entitled to full compensation for all reasonable and necessary medical expenses resulting from the accident.
Medical expenses include:
Hospital stays
Doctor visits
Surgeries
Diagnostic tests
Physical and rehabilitative therapy
Radiology charges
Ambulance cost
Prescription medications
Careful documentation is necessary to ensure maximum compensation for all medical expenses.
2. Lost Income
If your injuries from a slip and fall accident caused your absence from work for some time, you may be able to recover your lost income. Lost income can include salaries, wages, self-employed earnings, or lost business opportunities. It may also include bonuses, commissions, and benefits. You must show how much you’d have earned if you hadn’t sustained the injuries.
3. Loss of Earning Capacity
Severe injuries resulting from a slip and fall accident may significantly affect your ability to return to work in the future, either temporarily or permanently. Or they could limit you from doing the kind of work you did before.
In such cases, you may be able to obtain loss of earning capacity damages. You need to work with a slip-and-fall attorney to determine the economic value of your lost earning potential. If you can work but cannot earn the same income as before the injury, you can include a claim for damages for diminished earning capacity.
4. Costs of Living with Disability
A slip-and-fall injury may lead to an impairment that significantly alters your lifestyle. Damages may cover the costs that come with the changes. For instance, a damage award may reimburse you for the expenses of assistive walking devices, inhome nursing care, or renovating the home to ensure it is wheelchair-accessible if you cannot walk.
5. Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages are less tangible compared to economic damages. They are not easy to assign a monetary value, and are subjective because of the varying magnitude of suffering from one individual to another.
Non-economic damages generally encompass:
Pain and suffering
Loss of enjoyment of life
Anxiety and depression
Fear, humiliation, or embarrassment
Lower quality of life
Physical disfigurement and impairment
Mental anguish and emotional distress, ranging from depression to insomnia to PTSD
Loss of companionship
Loss of consortium
When calculating non-economic damages, several factors will be considered, including the victim’s age, injury severity, and income. A multiplier for non-economic damages is added to the actual and future economic costs.
6. Punitive Damages
Punitive damages are not intended to reimburse the victim but punish the defendant for negligence. This is meant to discourage the defendant and others from behaving similarly. Generally, punitive damages are awarded when the defendant’s conduct is deemed outrageous or egregious. Thesedamages are not awarded in all personal injury cases, and unless a compensatory damage award has been ordered, they may not be considered.
Usually, the courts limit punitive damages to less than ten times the amount of compensatory damages to avoid excessive punitive damages awards.
BottomLine
Tort laws would entitle you to several legal remedies if you were injured in a slip and fall accident due to the property owner’s negligence or intentional wrongful actions. Working with a slip and fall lawyer is essential to understand what types of injury compensation are available to your case and how much your case might be worth. An attorney will help you seek maximum compensation for injuries sustained in the accident.