How much is my car accident claim worth?
This is a question that car accident victims often ask, and for good reason. You want to make sure you get as much out of your claim as possible, otherwise months or perhaps even years from now you could find out that you don’t have the resources needed to truly offset your losses.
To prevent that from happening, you need to know how to analyze your claim and how to advocate for the compensation that you deserve. That’s why with this post we want to look a little bit at how to assess your claim.
Assessing your car accident damages
Your car accident can touch nearly every aspect of your life. So, as you analyze your personal injury claim, look at how your accident has negatively impacted those portions of your life. This includes assessing each of the following:
- Financial losses: Sure, you’ll want to try to recover money that you’ve already spent on your medical care, rehabilitation, and lost wages, but you can’t skimp on fighting for your anticipated losses. This requires you to take a forward-looking approach to your claim so that you capture anticipated medical and rehabilitative expenses and well as expected lost wages. Also consider how your injuries have impacted your ability to advance in your career. You want to be as broad and wide-reaching as you can when assessing how your accident injuries have negatively impacted your finances, and you’ll want documentation to back up your position.
- Pain and suffering: It’s hard to put a monetary value on the pain and suffering that you’ve experienced, but you might be able to increase your chances of demonstrating the true extent of your damages by keeping a journal that details what you’re feeling as you progress through your recovery. It can also be helpful to talk to your medical provider, who may be able to testify as to the level of pain you’ve been experiencing. This can be powerful testimony since it comes from a medical perspective and is less susceptible to a bias-based attack since the testimony isn’t coming directly from you.
- Lost enjoyment of life: Your injuries are going to dampen your ability to enjoy the activities that you once loved. You might be left unable to get on the floor to play with your children or grandchildren, your injuries might prevent you from engaging in an activity that you once loved, or you might be incapable of traveling to visit your aging loved ones like you used to. These types of losses can be compensable in your case, so be sure to track them in as detailed of a fashion as possible. Remember, you’re trying to paint a picture for the jury of how your accident injuries have negatively impacted your life.
There may be other places to look for damages. Just keep in mind that you want to articulate these losses as much as possible. So, keep all documentation related to your accident, and consider keeping your own written account of how your accident injuries have changed your life. Your attorney can help you develop arguments surrounding these losses so that you can come up with a monetary figure to seek as far as damages are concerned.
Are you ready to advocate for the compensation you deserve?
If so, then now is the time to get to work gathering evidence and crafting your legal strategy. Although that can be daunting to do, remember that you can find support throughout the process and that you’ll eventually get through your legal claim and your recovery. By putting in the work necessary, you’ll hopefully come out on the other side stronger and with the ability to reclaim the life that was unfairly stripped from you in your accident.