South Florida Injury Lawyer Blog
When you have been seriously injured in Florida due to an accident, product malfunction, or medical malpractice, your severe injuries may leave permanent damage impacting all areas of your life. At The Quackenbush Law Firm, we fight for you to ensure that you receive the compensation you deserve.
I leave no stone unturned when I investigate and evaluate every aspect of the accident and its consequences in order to determine, based on all the facts, how this will impact your future life. My goal is to ensure that you will have the resources to not only compensate for past expenses and take care of your immediate needs but to guarantee that you have the funding for ongoing medical care and fair compensation for your pain, suffering, and lost future earnings.
Long-term consequences
An accident can have repercussions throughout every aspect of your life – physical, psychological, social, and financial. Past losses as well as all future losses need to be evaluated and monetized in order to reach a compensation demand that fairly quantifies the consequences of the accident.
The possible long-term consequences of an accident are too numerous to list, but their broad categories include:
- Physical damage – chronic pain, limited mobility, loss of limbs, nerve pain, loss of senses, digestive problems, breathing disorders
- Psychological suffering – PTSD, trauma, anger, depression, mood swings, change in personality
- Mental/cognitive damage – memory loss, impaired cognitive abilities, migraines, tinnitus, sleep disruption, extreme fatigue
- Financial consequences – past lost income, future lost income, decreased earning capacity, damaged property, modifications needed for home, car, etc. to compensate for injuries, past and future costs of medical treatment (therapy, counseling, medical care, prescriptions, medical equipment), loss of benefits, such as health insurance, company 401k or pension, etc.
- Social damages – damaged relationships (marriage, friendships lost), loss of companionship, limitation of social options due to injuries
Calculating the future value of injuries
Many of these long-term consequences are quantifiable, especially past expenses, but who can put a price tag on a damaged marriage, PTSD, or the constant and maddening racket of tinnitus? Yet, for every client I take on, I work tirelessly to determine the full extent of their suffering and the impact of the damage they sustain. I enlist the best experts to help me calculate a significant compensation demand, with strong, unassailable evidence and math to back me up.
Many lawyers use the simple “multiplier” approach: add up all your quantifiable damages so far (medical, lost income, damage to car or other property, other expenses) and multiply by a factor between 1.5 and 5, depending on the severity of other, non-quantifiable damages (mental, emotional, relational) to come up with a “pain and suffering” number. While this can be useful to obtain a ballpark figure, I prefer to use an approach based on the facts and expert analysis.
- Financial, economic, and industry experts assess your likely future earnings, had you not been injured, taking into consideration your age, career, level of expertise, opportunities for advancement, estimated inflation during the years you would have worked, your level of impairment, and other factors to determine lost future earnings.
- Medical experts, counselors, physical therapists, and rehabilitation experts may be called on to evaluate and quantify health impacts that are more difficult to calculate: migraines, chronic pain, memory loss, etc.
- Psychoanalysts, counselors, vocational rehab experts, and life planners may work to identify and determine the degree to which emotional and relational damages may impact a person’s life and provide a quantifiable estimate.
The evaluations and advice of all these experts are added together, along with your past expenses, to reach the total value of the damages you have suffered. Based on my experience as a Florida personal injury lawyer, I know which experts to call on to calculate the fairest compensation claim and to support it with strong evidence, so that I can present an unassailable compensation demand when coming to the negotiating table or entering the courtroom.
I believe in “fighting for the little guy” against the big businesses and big insurance companies that have the financial resources to squash your efforts to recover fair damages due to someone else’s negligent behavior or faulty products. Contact me from anywhere in Florida at (954) 448-7288, 24/7, for a free consultation to see how I can help you.