Pain and suffering is one of those umbrella terms that most people generally understand but aren’t sure how to use. If you feel you should be entitled to these types of damages as part of your settlement or claim, then you need to know how much to ask for. Many people may provide an estimate that they feel is appropriate or feel shorted when they see their compensation check doesn’t include their pain and offers.
Local car accident attorneys are often responsible for valuing and demanding pain and suffering as part of a settlement.
What is Pain and Suffering?
Lawyers use pain and suffering as a catch-all term for anything that is not financially represented through bills. It includes feelings and things that often can’t have a dollar amount assigned. For example, you would expect to see “Grief – $200” on a store shelf.
That is exactly what legal teams throughout Georgia try to do. They look objectively as emotion-driven areas of life, including grief, worry, insomnia, anxiety, loss of life enjoyment, and more.
These damages may come into play if, for example, a back injury prevented you from ever playing golf. Now, for most people, that may not be a major concern. But if your love and weekend passion was golf, then you’ve lost something very important to you. That noneconomic loss will impact the remainder of your life, and all because of an accident.
How Can You Calculate Pain and Suffering?
While there are many guiding lights available for making these calculations, there are no hard-set rules. Some attorneys will suffer simply multiply the economic or financial loss by a number that falls between 1 and 5. They will decide the number based on the severity of the injuries or of the loss.
Using this process to calculate pain and suffering, an estimate may look something like this. A victim has medical bills of $10,000 and now experiences anxiety near cars and cannot bring themselves to drive. They may then multiply the $10,000 by 3 to represent the degree of anxiety and fear associated with the crash. The final damage request would be $30,000.
Now, the calculation for pain and suffering isn’t clear and unnegotiable. Many insurance companies or legal teams will argue against a claim of $30,000 in damages for pain and suffering.
The alternative approach to calculating these damages is to assign a value per day. You may experience about $55 of anxiety per day, and then the attorney would apply that over the affected days. Usually, this fits into pain and suffering issues that align directly with medical problems. For example, if you were seeing a therapist for PTSD or anxiety after a crash and then chose to end treatment, you would apply the per day from the beginning to the end of treatment.
Understanding Georgia’s Laws Around Pain and Suffering Claims
Georgia is one of the states that doesn’t have a cap on pain and suffering claims. That means that victims of an auto accident can pursue these damages until they feel satisfied with the results. That, however, doesn’t mean that all pain and suffering claims are just or would be considered.
You can submit a pain and suffering amount as part of your insurance demand letter, but the insurance company doesn’t have to consider it. Most of the time, they won’t consider pain and suffering unless it is clear that there is a lasting impact from the wreck. Requesting compensation for things like anxiety, worry, or loss of enjoyment are hard to prove.
With the golfing example, you may be able to prove that you were part of a golf club or actively played golf weekly. However, if you only putted in your backyard, your only proof would be a set of clubs. In the anxiety example, the entirety of the demand rotated around the presence of seeing a therapist.
Contact an Experienced Car Accident Attorney at The Weinstein Firm
The Weinstein Firm is a starting point for anyone looking to fight for fair compensation. That means going beyond economic losses and looking at noneconomic losses too. A car accident attorney can work with various experts, and professionals to fairly assess your noneconomic losses.
To set up a meeting and discuss your crash and situation with an attorney, contact our offices. Our offices help Atlanta crash victims fight for compensation when it seems like insurance companies or the driver’s involved can’t or won’t comply with expectations. Our attorneys will fight for you, call us today.
