How Do You Calculate Pain And Suffering After A Car Accident?
Car accidents are bad enough to endure. After all, you may have sprained your ankle or totaled your car during a bad car accident. But what happens if you suffer from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) afterwards? You need to hire a personal injury lawyer to help you craft a great personal injury lawsuit. You also need to read this article for more information to guide you during the process.
Pain and suffering injuries and the multiplier method
While calculating monetary awards resulting from bodily injury and/or property damage is fairly straightforward, the same is not true for insurance companies that are calculating settlements for pain and suffering. Your personal injury lawyer will tell you this. It’s not uncommon for insurance adjusters to use the multiplier method in this instance. The adjuster will multiply the total settlement award for your bodily injuries and/or property damage by a number. This number used to be 3. However, many insurance companies arrive at a settlement amount for pain and suffering by using complex computer programs. The settlement amount you receive is generally undervalued. The types of medical injuries you have sustained also plays a key role in determining the multiplier value to be used
The daily rate method
Personal injury lawyers in Rocklin know that insurance adjusters use another method of calculating monetary awards. This method is the daily rate method. This is used to calculate the amount to give you for pain and suffering. In this instance, the adjuster will disburse a daily rate (per diem) amount to reimburse you for. For example, if you sustained $2000 in lost income and $6000 in medical expenses, you may be given a daily per diem allowance of $300 until you recovered enough to return to work at least part time. Remember that the insurance adjuster will use many factors and variables related to your personal injury accident and pain and suffering when calculating the fair amount of daily per diem allowance to give you for recovery.
Calculating the final value
Your personal injury lawyer in Santa Paula will inform you that most insurance adjusters use a combination of the multiplier and daily rate methods when determining the amount to award you for pain and suffering. This is because pain and suffering are complex and hard to determine since there is no straightforward monetary value attached to it. By contrast, medical bills are easy to reimburse because of the definitive numerical values attached to these expenses. If you hire the right legal help, you can indeed win a settlement for pain and suffering either in or out of court.
