What Types of Compensation will I Get After a Car Accident?

Types of Car Accident Injury Damages:

Before the insurance company even begins to consider your Car Accident compensation, they will consider if you were at fault, and if yes, at what percentage. The insurance company is highly motivated to find you even slightly at fault as they can use this as leverage to dramatically reduce any financial compensation you are due. It is imperative to speak with your Personal Injury Attorney to help guide you as to what information you should freely provide the insurance company and what you shouldn’t talk about because they can use it against you.

On that note, let’s talk about the 2 most common forms of damages.

The “damages” in a Personal Injury case refer to the cost of your injuries. They will consider your direct financial costs, emotional costs of the accident and indirect costs.

Compensatory Damages: These are the most common types of damages awarded:

• Specific Damages. This refers to a specific amount of money used  related to accident injuries or financial loss. They include:
  • Cost of Medical Treatments: cost of therapies and diagnostic equipment used to help you deal with your Car Accident Injuries. 
  • Loss of Earning Capacity: how this injury might affect future work potential and ability to work effectively.
  • Lost Wages: through time missed at your place of employment as well as bonuses missed.
  • Property loss: this could be car repairs, towing and rental expenses, vehicle upgrades such as an MP3 player. 
• General Damages. These damages are more subjective:
  • Pain and suffering: Physical pain and suffering includes soft tissue damage, broken bones and organ damage. Persistent pain is quite common in Car Accident victims. 
  • Emotional distress: Personal Injury victims experience some type of emotional distress in varying degrees of severity. Whether it is anxiety, depression, guilt, frustration, insomnia or anger. 
  • Inability to have children as a result of accident-related injuries.
  • Loss of an extremity: Some victims even experience pain where their limb used to be. Victims who suffer from “phantom limb” sensations often suffer from psychological trauma and lack of ease in life.
  • Loss of consortium: a limitation of usual marital relations due to Personal Injury to one spouse or the other, whether that is sex, affection or companionship, the ability to perform household chores and ability to perform normal parenting tasks.

Here is a basic calculator to help determine a rough number of how much compensation you might receive.

If you need further help to address your questions you may go to our FAQ page here, or if you need to you can speak to one of   Top Attorneys after a car accident at no cost by clicking the link below.