Your injuries probably cost you a lot of money. You likely paid for medical treatment and faced months or even years of physical or mental health therapy. You might have missed significant time from work. You may have even paid to modify your home to accommodate your disabilities. These represent your economic damages.
You also suffer equally real but less calculable damages. Pain made you miserable. Worry caused sleepless nights. And your injuries disabled you from playing with your kids or doing the other activities you enjoyed. These losses constitute non-economic losses in California, and they may make up the bulk of your damages.
What Are Non-Economic Damages?
Economic damages represent the financial losses you incur due to your injuries. These losses are tangible and calculable based on bills and expenses. Non-economic damages, however, represent all the ways your injuries affected your quality of life, covering any physical or mental suffering caused by your injuries.
You cannot add up the numbers from your receipts to put a number on these losses. By their nature, they are not financial. But since insurers and jurors must put a value on your losses, you can estimate your non-economic losses based on the duration of your injuries and their severity.
Severe injuries cause greater pain and emotional distress. Thus, a shattered bone from an auto accident will justify greater non-economic damages than a simple fracture from a slip and fall accident. Even though both injuries may eventually heal, the shattered bone can cause significantly more erosion to your quality of life.
Permanent injuries, like an amputation suffered in a construction site accident, could justify an even greater non-economic damage award. After the amputation, you will have lifelong disabilities even if you get fitted with a prosthesis.
Examples of Non-Economic Losses
Non-economic losses can include anything that diminishes your enjoyment of life. Some examples include:
Physical Pain
Pain robs you of sleep. It makes your life uncomfortable. It can even lead to further injuries as you favor your injured body part and stress your uninjured parts. Pain also has practical effects. You might need to change your daily routine. Your doctor may prescribe pain medication that causes unwanted side effects. All of these losses can qualify as non-economic losses.
For example, the money you pay for pain medication represents an economic loss, while the nausea you feel when you take your medication represents a non-economic loss.
Mental Suffering
Mental anguish can have both emotional and physical effects. Stress causes a release of hormones like cortisol that, over time, can cause high blood pressure and other diseases.
Stress can also make you irritable, sad, or anxious. You may experience emotional outbursts and fall into substance abuse. Mental effects may qualify as non-economic losses just as physical effects do.
Disability
Injuries can prevent you from doing what you want to do. Whether they prevent you from working, traveling, or participating in your hobbies, your injuries have diminished your life. Similarly, by disabling you, your injuries may have deprived you of the ability to live independently, earn money, and take care of yourself.
The Role of Causation
To receive non-economic damages, you will generally need to first prove causation (in addition to three other legal elements). Causation includes proof that the at-fault party’s actions were both a cause-in-fact and a proximate cause of the non-economic losses.
Cause-in-fact means the other party’s actions logically fall in the chain of events that ended with your injury, while proximate cause means an injury was foreseeable in view of the other party’s actions. This does not mean the other party actually foresaw your precise injury. Instead, it means they did something that a reasonable person would foresee as likely to injure.
Methods for Calculating Non-Economic Damages
California law does not set any fixed standard for calculating non-economic damages. Instead, a jury puts a value on your non-economic damages using its conscience and common sense. To persuade a jury to award fair non-economic damages, you will testify about your injuries and how they have affected your life.
In addition, your lawyer might also hire an expert witness to present two theories for quantifying non-economic losses. One theory, called the multiplier method, calls on the jury to assign a multiplier between 1.1 and 5.0 based on the severity and duration of your injuries. They multiply your economic losses by your multiplier to calculate your total damages.
The second theory, called the per diem method, requires the jury to set a daily cost for your losses. The jury then multiplies your daily cost by the number of days you suffered your injuries.
Suppose that you suffered a burn injury. A jury could set a small multiplier or daily cost if you suffered a second-degree burn that fully healed. But it could set a large multiplier or daily cost for third-degree burns that caused permanent scars.
Your Encino Personal Injury Lawyer’s Role
You and your lawyer will discuss your injuries and how they impacted your life. Your lawyer can then calculate the compensation you are entitled to and gather the evidence necessary to secure it.
In many cases, non-economic damages will exceed your economic losses. Consult an experienced Encino injury attorney at JUSTICENTER Personal Injury Lawyers to determine the full amount of damages available to you and how best to pursue this compensation. Contact our law office at 833-852-3600 today for a free consultation.
