If you feel you need to file a personal injury lawsuit against an individual or entity, that presumably means you feel they harmed you. Maybe they injured you or made you ill. In some instances, you might also file a personal injury lawsuit on someone else’s behalf.
You will need to make sure that you find an excellent lawyer with expertise in this area if you hope to win your lawsuit. That’s the formula to get damages of both an economic and non-economic nature.
You can get money from both economic and non-economic damages, but you might wonder which kind will turn into more cash in your pocket when the trial concludes. We’ll talk about that right now.
What Does the Term “Economic Damages” Mean?
In the personal injury legal niche, the term “economic damages” means money paid out or lost by the plaintiff for which they’re trying to hold the defendant legally responsible. The plaintiff can produce evidence that they lost this particular amount of money, and they’re trying to recoup those economic losses through legal action, along with their lawyer’s help.
If you’re talking about economic damages in a personal injury case, maybe you’ll bring up something like the cost of medical bills for a condition that the plaintiff alleges the defendant caused. Something like the copay to cover a surgery, copay costs for visiting an urgent care facility, or the copays for medication would fall into this category.
If you’re suing someone after a car accident, you might try to get economic damages if you had to pay to repair your vehicle out of pocket. If you missed some work while recovering, and you lost some wages, then you may try to get those back from the defendant as well.
What About “Non-Economic Damages?”
If you’re talking about non-economic damages in a personal injury lawsuit, that means the cost of something that’s less tangible, but that still impacted your life. In other words, if you believe the defendant harmed you in certain ways, but you can’t definitively prove that they should pay you back a particular amount, you’re probably speaking about non-economic damages.
You will hear the term “pain and suffering” in personal injury trials a lot. Those fall into the realm of non-economic damages. For instance, if another driver smashed into your car, you might want money from them to cover your lost wages, but you may also want additional cash to cover the pain you endured from a surgery or physical therapy sessions.
As you might imagine, it’s a little more difficult to put an exact price on how much a defendant should pay you to make you feel like you got justice after they injured you or made you ill. Many times, you will need to look at precedent from similar cases to determine the appropriate amount of money you should receive.
Now, let’s talk about when you will get more from either economic or non-economic damages in a personal injury trial.
Times When You Will Probably Get More Money in Economic Damages
If you get more money in economic damages than non-economic ones, then that probably means you obviously sustained some monetary losses from the defendant’s action or inaction, but it’s not clear or obvious that you went through something for which you should get non-economic ones as well.
For instance, let’s say that you’re suing someone after a car accident. You allege that they ran into you and caused the crash, but they won’t admit their guilt. You’re in an at-fault state, meaning the responsible party’s insurance must pay for the damages. However, the other driver won’t admit their guilt.
You can sue them to try and get back the money that you spent on things like the damage to the car. However, maybe the crash didn’t hurt you physically at all. You didn’t miss any work, and you didn’t even have to see a doctor.
In such an instance, it’s not likely that you will try to get money from non-economic damages. That’s because it’s debatable whether you endured anything that would make you eligible.
Times When You Will Get More Money in Non-Economic Damages
Maybe you’re looking at a situation, though, where the other driver hit you, and they injured you so badly that you lost a limb through amputation in the aftermath. The other driver won’t accept responsibility.
That means you’ll probably want to sue them for economic losses, such as the cost of repairing the car. You will also try to recoup the money that you lost for the time you had to miss work, and you may have copays from the surgery and other medical bills as well.
However, the accident also left you traumatized, and you certainly could make the argument that you endured pain and suffering. Not only that, but your life will not look the same at all moving forward.
You must learn to live with one less limb. Maybe you can never go back to your previous profession, either.
In such a situation, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that you will try to get both economic and non-economic damages from the other driver. If you can prove that they ingested alcohol or exceeded the posted speed limit by quite a bit before they hit your car, then you can request even more money from them in damages.
In such a scenario, it’s likely that you will get a lot more in non-economic damages than you will in economic ones. The jury should sympathize with you, and they will probably react with horror when they hear how carelessly and callously the other driver behaved.You might get a few thousand in economic damages, but you could get much more than that in non-economic ones. The jury will want to compensate you for the loss of your limb and how much your life will change from this point onward.
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