You’ve suffered a personal injury due to another person’s actions. Your injury could have happened as a result of negligence, in a car accident, or even an intentional act by the other person. But healing any physical injury you have experienced is just the beginning of the recovery you’ll need to address. You may also be left with financial losses, known as economic damages.
What Are Economic Damages?
If your personal injury requires medical care, chances are you are already incurring a pile of medical bills just trying to get healthy again. If your injuries require a hospital stay, you have hospital bills on top of doctor bills. Even if you have insurance, you likely have a deductible that will require you to pay at least some amount out-of-pocket. If your insurance company delays payment or, worse, denies your claim, you will be faced with paying your own medical bills, which have been increasing while dealing with your insurer.
If your personal injury caused you to take time off work, you could have lost income, especially if you are paid hourly or work on commission. Your losses could be even more if you are self-employed. When you return to work, you could lose clients who needed services while you were not available.
How Are Medical Expenses Calculated?
In Texas, economic damages, also called “special” damages, are awarded to return the injured plaintiff to his or her financial state as it existed at the time the personal injury occurred. If you accumulated $500,000 in medical bills after your injury, the recovery of economic damages should either be enough to pay the providers or reimburse you if you already paid them.
Medical expenses are probably the most common economic damages you can recover in a personal injury case in Texas. If you were treated for a medical condition or an injury lately, you probably noticed that you receive numerous separate bills from each provider instead of one big bill for all your expenses. For example, you will receive a bill from the hospital and from your doctor, or each doctor if you see more than one.
Your hospital bill will also be itemized for everything from your hospital room to “renting” the operating room that was used if you required surgery. This can be quite confusing and something that your personal injury attorney or even an expert witness in medical billing needs to examine to submit into evidence.
How Are Lost Wages Calculated?
For those who were employed at the time the personal injury happened, the recovery of lost wages may also be a significant part of the economic damages you can recover in Texas. If you were not able to earn an income while you were recovering, economic damages should reimburse you for lost wages.
If you are paid on a salary or hourly, these should be fairly easy to calculate. Your employer can usually provide documentation of how much you were earning before your injury and calculate that by the amount of time you were not working during your recovery. If you are paid commissions or overtime, your lost wages may be more difficult to calculate and may require the services of an accountant or other expert witness to satisfy the court that the calculations are reasonable.
What Other Damages May Be Recovered in a Personal Injury Lawsuit in Texas?
In addition to economic damages which are based primarily on actual dollar figures that have been incurred or lost as a result of a personal injury, other types of damages may also be awarded. One of these is punitive damages, which may be awarded if the personal injury was intentional and malicious, rather than being an accident. In Texas, there is a cap on the amount of these damages.
The other type is non-economic damages, also called general damages. These represent losses that cannot be calculated as easily as economic damages. These cannot be easily determined from medical bills and employment records. Some of the types of non-economic damages that can be recovered include pain and suffering, mental anguish, and possible future losses such as continuing medical treatment and time off work.
A Personal Injury Lawyer Can Assess Your Economic Damages
Collecting and submitting evidence to recover damages is much more complicated than it sounds. First, you have to win the case in court or get the other side to settle. The damages phase comes after that. A skilled personal injury lawyer will have experience in these matters and can be the key to your success in recovering your past, current, and future financial losses related to your personal injury.