Injury cases can often be traumatic and tragic, potentially leaving victims with long-term recovery periods or even permanent injuries and disabilities. When your life is uprooted or when a loved one is killed in an accident, getting compensation for those harms can be a huge help when it comes to getting your life back on track or dealing with the pain and discomfort you now face.
Our attorneys can help you throughout the process. We start by identifying who was at fault and gathering evidence to prove your case against them. From there, we can work to negotiate a settlement and file insurance claims or even take your case to court if needed.
Call our Columbus, AL personal injury lawyers at Howe Law today at (844) 876-4357 for a free review of your potential injury case.
Elements of a Personal Injury Case in Phenix City, AL
When you are trying to hold someone else accountable for your injuries, you might be successful with an insurance claim or a demand letter sent to that party. However, these types of settlements are often low-dollar settlements paid simply to end the case and stop any further claims. If you take your case to court, you could be entitled to full compensation for what happened to you – but you will have to prove four elements of your claim first.
Duty
For someone to be responsible for your injuries, there must be some existing responsibility that they owed you. Generally, people have no obligation to each other except to refrain from intentionally injuring them, but by virtue of sharing the roadway or having a guest in their home, the law might place a legal duty on them.
Often, the duty is one of “reasonableness.” That is, an objective standard based on what a reasonable person would do in the same situation. However, many situations have specific laws on point, such as traffic laws or building codes, that tell people how they should act.
In the case of medical malpractice claims, the duty is often a confusing one set by other doctors in the same field with similar experience, so our personal injury attorneys will need to call other doctors to testify about this “standard of care.” Sometimes, other “industry standards” create the duty as well.
Breach
The defendant needs to have violated the duty in some way in order to hold them liable for your injuries. If they did everything right, then you cannot legally blame them for the accident.
Determining whether a breach of duty occurred in your case is a fact-specific question and usually involves many details. In some cases, expert testimony might be required to determine whether the actions of a doctor, engineer, contractor, or other professional or person with special training was deficient enough to qualify as a breach.
Causation
If the defendant’s bad actions did not actually affect you, and your injuries resulted from some other cause, then that defendant cannot be held liable. Sometimes injuries are simply unavoidable, and whether the defendant acted properly or not would not have made a difference.
Proving causation can sometimes be confusing, especially in Alabama. Alabama uses a “contributory negligence” rule, which states that if your own actions contributed to causing your accident in any way, you are blocked from suing the defendant.
In the event that our review of the evidence shows that a different party’s negligence actually caused your accident, it might be possible to sue that party instead or to sue multiple at-fault entities for their own share of fault.
Damages
If you were not harmed in some way, you cannot get compensation for the accident. Even when the defendant’s actions were wrong and egregious, you cannot file a personal injury case without some kind of injury. However, the injury you sue for can be a non-physical one; mental anguish and emotional distress damages are issued all the time in injury cases.
Calculating Damages in Your Phenix City Personal Injury Claim
Damages are a complex part of any personal injury case. The name “damages” is both the term used for the harms you faced as well as the monetary compensation you receive for those harms. For example, you might have faced $10,000 in damages for medical bills, so we will demand that the defendant pay you $10,000 in monetary damages.
Damages can be both economic and non-economic. This means getting compensation for the medical expenses you had to pay and other bills and expenses, as well as intangible harms like pain and suffering.
To calculate economic damages, you usually start by gathering up all of the bills and receipts for expenses related to your injury. This can also include property damage that resulted in the same accident, such as a car damaged in a crash. You can also claim compensation for any bills and expenses that came about as a result of the accident later, such as lost wages at work or payments for childcare while you spent time in the hospital.
Some of these damages are difficult to put a value on. For example, if you cannot work anymore and need compensation for lost future earnings, it is difficult to say how much money you would have made because we need to take into account lost promotions and how much more time you would have worked before retirement if you were not injured. Often, we need to use financial experts to calculate these damages.
Non-economic damages are often calculated as a multiple of your other damages or determined by assigning a daily value to your pain and suffering. If your injury was more severe, the pain and suffering is assumed to be more severe as well. “Severity” is determined by looking at a wide range of effects, such as changes to your daily life, visible scarring, depression, and lost enjoyment of activities your injuries keep you enjoying.
Call Our Phenix City, AL Personal Injury Attorneys Today
Call the personal injury lawyers at Howe Law today for a free case review at (844) 876-4357.
