Accidents can cause serious injuries that cause significant economic harm and intangible losses. If you were injured in an accident caused by someone else’s negligence, you may be entitled to recover compensation for the damages you’ve sustained.
As part of your claim, you may be eligible to recover various types of damages – including those that are not as obvious or tangible. A personal injury lawyer can review your case and pursue the damages you’re entitled to.
Types of Damages Awarded in Personal Injury Cases
Damages represent what a victim is awarded if they prove a case. In Georgia, you may be able to recover the following types of damages:
Economic Damages
Economic damages are those that have a direct financial impact on the victim. You must prove the value of these damages, which may include:
- Medical expenses, including rehabilitation and therapy
- Lost wages, income, and/or earning capacity
- The value of services the victim provided to their family, such as housecleaning or childcare
- Funeral and burial expenses (in wrongful death cases)
- Other monetary expenses
An experienced personal injury lawyer can help gather documentation, such as medical bills, wage loss statements, and receipts, to prove the value of these losses.
Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages recognize that all accident victims suffer in ways that cannot be easily quantified. These damages compensate for pain, suffering, and other such losses.
While Georgia law does not cap the amount of economic damages, it does cap the amount of compensation that can be awarded for non-economic damages in certain cases. For example, in a medical malpractice case, only $350,000 can be awarded against a single medical facility and $700,000 against all medical facilities.
Economic and non-economic damages combined are called compensatory damages, as they are intended to compensate victims for the losses they’ve incurred.
Punitive Damages
Unlike economic and non-economic damages, punitive damages are not awarded to compensate the victim. Instead, they are awarded to punish the defendant and deter similar conduct in the future. They are reserved for cases involving “willful misconduct, malice, fraud, wantonness, oppression” or conscious indifference to harm to people or property, such as drunk driving accidents.
Common Types of Non-Economic Damages
Examples of non-economic damages in a Georgia personal injury case include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Physical and emotional pain
- Discomfort
- Anxiety
- Hardship
- Distress
- Suffering
- Inconvenience
- Physical impairment
- Mental anguish
- Disfigurement
- Loss of enjoyment of life
- PTSD
- Loss of society and companionship
- Loss of consortium
- Injury to reputation
An experienced personal injury lawyer can review your case and determine the non-economic damages for which you can request compensation.
How Non-Economic Damages Are Valued
Economic damages are more straightforward to quantify because they involve dollars and cents. For example, you can look at a medical bill or repair estimate to see how much that expense set the victim back. Valuing non-economic damages is more complicated because they do not have a specific monetary value tied to them.
Insurance adjusters and courts may use a multiplier to value economic damages. For example, in a case involving minor injuries, they may use a multiplier of 2 times the value of economic damages to arrive at a value for non-economic damages. They may use a multiplier of 5 for the most serious injuries.
Another commonly used method is called the per diem method. This entails assigning a daily rate to your non-economic damages and then multiplying that number by the number of days you’ve experienced those consequences of the accident.
Proving Your Non-Economic Damages
While it is not as straightforward to prove non-economic damages as it is to prove economic damages, it can still be done. Some of the types of evidence you can introduce include:
- Entries in a pain journal where they indicate their daily symptoms, pain, and complications
- Testimony from friends, colleagues, and loved ones about how the accident has affected their life
- Records from a mental health professional evidencing the anxiety and mental anguish you’ve experienced
- Their personal testimony about how the accident has negatively impacted their life
An experienced personal injury lawyer can help prepare your claim for the maximum compensation available.
Contact an Atlanta Personal Injury Lawyer for Legal Assistance
If you were injured in an accident caused by someone else’s negligence, you should be fairly compensated for your accident-related injuries and losses, including those losses that are difficult to quantify.
Our Atlanta personal injury attorneys at Goldstein Hayes & Lina, LLC have over 85 years of combined experience and have collected over $600 million for our clients. Contact us at (404) 869-8600 to discuss how we can help identify, support, and value non-economic damages when you call us for a free case review.
