Personal injury cases can be chaotic if you don’t know what’s going on! Amongst all the legalese, scheduling, and meetings with your injury lawyer, you might feel a bit adrift, awash in a sea that you’re supposed to be sailing in. JD Haas is here to help. As longtime injury lawyers, we’ve seen and heard it all, and we’d be happy to help you through this troubling time—be it with our legal services, information, or both.
Hence, below you’ll find a quick discussion on how payment from a personal injury case is determined and awarded.
Insurance Companies Use a Formula
It’s impossible to put a price on human suffering, but for the sake of legal matters, your insurance company—if that’s the route you choose to go—will try. Nolo has written a wonderful article that gets into the mathematical specifics of the formula that your adjuster will use to begin the claims process. For practical purposes, though, know this: that formula doesn’t determine the exact amount of compensation you receive. It’s just meant to get the insurance company in a ballpark range to continue investigating the situation.
Additionally, extraneous factors, such as how painful your injury was, can affect how much or how little money is given as compensation.
From Where Is the Monetary Amount Determined?
Generally speaking, your personal injury attorney will seek to recover damages from pain and suffering, lost income, and medical expenses. If your case reaches court, you may recover punitive damages, though the chances of this in Minnesota are slim.
The factors determining your settlement amount can also vary between case types, and not all factors apply to all cases. For example, a child injury lawyer might seek to recover damages from “poor living conditions,” but this may not apply in, say, a dog bite case.
Why a Monetary Settlement?
Unless the damages are punitive in nature, the money received by a personal injury victim isn’t intended to punish the wrongdoer. Your personal injury lawyer will attempt to recover damages so that your life can get back to the way it was before the accident occurred; the money is for your benefit. As we said, it’s intended to cover medical bills, lost income, and pain and suffering—all things directly related to the case and all things that were not in place before the event occurred.
JD Haas: Compassionate Legal Help, Just a Phone Call Away
Personal injury cases aren’t something you should have to fight through on your own. Reach our caring team of Minneapolis injury lawyers at (952) 234-2925. In addition to Minneapolis, we also serve Bloomington, Rochester, and Saint Paul.
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