If you’ve been injured in an accident in Georgia caused by someone else’s negligence, you could recover substantial compensation with a personal injury claim.
Whether you negotiate a settlement with the at-fault person or party’s insurer or win a court judgment, your compensation check will be a flat figure. However, this figure comprises several different damages, representing your losses.
What are these different types of compensation?
This blog post outlines the various damages you may be able to recover and the different types of personal injury that can yield compensation.
The Different Types of Personal Injury
A personal injury can happen anywhere, at any time. You might be struck by a speeding car while on your way to work; you might suffer a slip and fall at a restaurant or grocery store, or you might tragically lose a loved one because of medical malpractice.
The legal process of filing a claim is largely the same, no matter the injury you or your loved one has suffered. However, every accident and injury is unique — some are more complex than others. Appointing an attorney with experience winning claims of your type can give you a massive advantage — that’s why law firms often classify claims by accident or injury. These claim types include:
- Car accident claims
- Truck accident claims
- Motorcycle accident claims
- Drunk driving accident claims (specifically for auto accidents caused by drunk drivers)
- Pedestrian accident claims
- Wrongful death claims
- Premises liability claims
- Product liability claims
- Traumatic brain injury claims
- Spinal cord injury claims
- Medical malpractice claims.
But what compensation can you recover from these types of personal injury claims?
The Different Types of Damages
Damages is the legal term used to represent the various losses you have suffered since being harmed by someone else’s negligent or reckless action (or inaction).
There are three types of damages:
- Economic damages
- Non-economic damages
- Punitive damages.
Let’s break each of these down.
Economic Damages
The first type of compensation is economic damages. As the name suggests, these damages have an economic value; you can quantify them with bills, receipts, quotes, and wage slips.
Economic damages are also called special damages, comprising medical bills, lost wages, and property damage.
Medical Bills
Medical expenses can compound fast after an accident. Your emergency room bills might total thousands of dollars alone. Add on the costs of scans, tests, surgery, follow-up appointments, medication, and physical therapy, and you might be hit with an eye-watering bill. But in a personal injury claim, the negligent party must reimburse you for all medical costs associated with your accident.
You are also entitled to the cost of future treatment, whether you will need rehabilitation for several months or medication for the rest of your life.
It is vital to seek medical attention as soon as possible after your accident. To recover compensation, you must show your injuries stemmed from the accident caused by someone else’s negligence. Without this proof, the at-fault party’s insurer might deny your claim or refuse to offer a fair settlement, claiming your injuries happened later on or that they aren’t as severe as you make out.
Many accident victims avoid seeking medical attention when they’re hurt in an accident because they can’t afford to pay for treatment up-front. However, your health must come first. You might ignore your chronic head pain, thinking it’s just a headache — and it might be — but it could also be a sign of a traumatic brain injury that needs urgent treatment.
If you are concerned about paying for medical treatment, speak to a personal injury attorney in Georgia as soon as possible. Your lawyer can draft a Letter of Protection, a legal agreement between you and your medical provider that postpones payment of your medical bills until your claim is resolved.
Lost Wages
When you suffer a personal injury, you’ll likely need to take time off work. A broken bone might leave you unable to work for a few months while it heals or even longer if you need surgery and additional recovery. Some injuries can prevent you from working for years, affecting your ability to provide for your family. And all the while, you continue to wrack up medical bills for ongoing treatment, causing further stress.
Fortunately, lost income is another type of compensation you can recover via a personal injury claim.
But what if you cannot return to work? This can happen if you suffer a traumatic brain injury that leaves you with a permanent disability. Even injuries that heal without complication can have long-term or lifelong effects. A wrist fracture might heal without surgery but leave you with chronic pain or permanent weakness that prevents you from performing your work duties, like heavy lifting. This might force you to seek alternative employment and take a pay cut or retrain.
You can also recover compensation for your future earnings including diminished earning capacity if your injury impacts your ability to earn a promotion or pay rise.
The purpose of this type of compensation is to make you financially whole by replacing the income you would have earned if the injury had not happened.
While future costs like wages and medical treatment can be quantified, there is an element of speculation here. It’s impossible to predict how your prognosis might change, how you might respond to treatment later on, or what the economic landscape will be five, ten, or fifteen years from now.
Expert witnesses can be invaluable in helping you secure fair compensation that accounts for your future expenses. For example, a medical expert can testify about the future treatment you will need, and economic experts can assess your future earning capacity and how much you would have likely earned had you not suffered your injury, adjusting your wages for inflation to ensure an accurate total.
Property Damage
The last type of special damages commonly recovered in personal injury claims covers property damage. This type of compensation commonly applies in auto accident claims to cover the costs of repairing your vehicle (or your car’s value if it was totaled). However, you can also recover property damage costs in other types of personal injury claims. Property damage covers personal items damaged during your accident, such as a watch, piece of jewelry, or glasses damaged in a slip and fall.
Non-Economic Damages
The second category of damages accident victims can recover in a Georgia personal injury claim is called non-economic or general damages.
Non-economic damages go beyond the tangible costs of an injury and are much harder to quantify as they do not have a fixed economic value.
What makes this type of compensation more challenging to calculate is that it is subjective. General damages compensate you for the overall impact of your injury on your life, such as the inability to pursue a hobby you enjoyed before your injury or chronic pain and discomfort you suffer long after the physical injury has healed.
It is typically calculated using the multiplier method — your economic damages are multiplied by a number between 1.5 and 5. Insurance companies will use various formulas to determine which multiplier to use. Normally, life-changing or severe injuries that have a long-term impact warrant higher multipliers.
The alternative is to calculate your losses “per diem” or “for each day”. This method quantifies your losses for one day and multiplies the figure by how many days you have suffered and how many more days your injury will continue to affect your life.
Pain and Suffering
Georgia personal injury law recognizes the physical and emotional toll an injury can take. Compensation for pain and suffering compensates you for physical pain and discomfort and psychological effects or conditions such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The emotional effect of an accident on your life — whatever form it takes — is commonly called “emotional distress” or “mental anguish”.
For example, you might be injured in a car accident and experience severe driving anxiety that prevents you from getting behind the wheel. As a result, you withdraw yourself from family and friends and overly rely on others to run errands, like grocery shopping and picking the kids up from school. This can take an enormous toll on your mental health, making you depressed.
Alternatively, you might suffer post-traumatic stress disorder after an accident and experience painful flashbacks. When you can sleep, you have nightmares, leaving you feeling more exhausted than before you slept. This makes you irritable, causing you to lash out at well-meaning loved ones, which then affects your relationships and leaves you feeling isolated and miserable.
Loss of Enjoyment
Your physical injuries and the pain or emotional distress associated with them can have a massive effect on your lifestyle and enjoyment of life.
You might enjoy dancing or playing golf with your friends. Perhaps your go-to method of decompressing after a long week is to plant flowers in your garden or walk the trail through Buford Dam.
However, a leg injury might prevent you from walking long distances without severe pain. A back injury might stop you from being able to tend to your flower beds or pick up and play with your grandchildren.
This type of damages compensates you for those losses and their impact on your quality of life.
Loss of Consortium
Injuries don’t just affect the person who is hurt; they can also have a profound impact on relationships.
Loss of consortium compensation is available to the spouse of the injured person and covers the following:
- The emotional and relational impact an injury can have on a spousal relationship.
- Changes in an injured person’s ability to show love and affection, affecting the intimacy and connection in a relationship.
- The inability of the injured person to provide the same level of emotional and practical support as before the injury.
For example, your spouse might become your carer after a life-changing injury because you cannot do certain tasks, such as taking out the garbage, cooking meals, and looking after the household.
Your injury might also affect your marriage, as you cannot be intimate with your partner.
Punitive Damages
This type of compensation is available when you file a personal injury lawsuit. Awarded by the court, punitive damages are unlike compensatory damages in that they punish the at-fault party. As such, punitive damages can be awarded when the conduct of the person or party that caused your accident was egregious, reckless, or intentional.
Punitive damages also make an example of a defendant and deter similar conduct — hence, punitive damages may also be called exemplary damages. For example, punitive damages might apply in a drunk-driving case where the liable driver recklessly got behind the wheel despite being over the limit and knowing they could cause significant harm to other motorists or pedestrians. In this scenario, punitive damages acknowledge the prevalence of drunk driving and send a message that it will not be tolerated.
Punitive damages can be significant, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation besides the economic and non-economic damages awarded.
Like most states, Georgia law caps punitive damages at $250,000, regardless of how much a jury awards. However, there are exceptions.
There is no limit to the punitive damages you can recover in a product liability case. However, 75% of this award is paid to the state of Georgia. There is also no cap if the at-fault party acted with intent to cause harm or the defendant was under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Wrongful Death Damages
If a person dies because of someone else’s negligence or intentional actions, the surviving family members may be eligible for wrongful death damages. This type of compensation is also categorized into general and special damages, such as:
- Funeral and burial expenses
- Loss of financial support
- Emotional distress
- Loss of companionship.
Wrongful death claims are complex and require the expertise of an experienced personal injury attorney to navigate the legal process and secure just compensation for the family.
Attorney Fees and Legal Costs
Hiring a Buford personal injury law firm can incur substantial legal costs. The cost is well worth it, allowing you to benefit from decades of expertise and experience winning court judgments and negotiating life-changing settlements. One of the biggest benefits of hiring an attorney is that they take on the legal burden so you can focus on your recovery or adapting to life with your injury.
However, legal counsel becomes more costly the longer your case takes to resolve. Insurance companies might drag their feet and refuse to make a fair offer. You might decide to sue and then need to go through the legal procedure of discovery. Your attorney will gather evidence, take depositions and interrogatories of eyewitnesses and experts, and advocate for you during your trial. Expert witnesses can tip the scales in your case, but they likely won’t come cheap. You might need to pay them to travel to court to testify and cover accommodation while the trial is underway, evaluations, reports, presentations, and their time on the stand itself, which can total hundreds of dollars per hour.
Personal injury lawyers work on a contingency basis, which means you only pay legal fees when you win. This payment is deducted from your compensation award with any liens (additional legal costs and medical bills if your payment is deferred), which lightens the financial burden when you’re out of work and vulnerable.
However, in Georgia, the court may order the at-fault party to pay your attorney fees. The defendant must have acted in bad faith or with wilful misconduct to be liable for paying your legal fees.
How Much Compensation Will You Receive? Understanding Georgia’s Modified Comparative Negligence Rule
Injuries affect people differently. Two people might hit their head in a slip and fall, and one might suffer a concussion while the other sustains a more severe traumatic brain injury. Similarly, one broken bone injury might heal without complication, and another might leave an accident victim with chronic pain and weakness.
As such, your compensation entitlement can vary widely. But the compensation you deserve — and the compensation you are awarded — does not always equal how much you will receive.
While accidents can happen solely because of one person or party’s negligence, often, you might be partly responsible.
For example, you might get rear-ended by a driver who is tailgating you, but you might have been driving too slowly or brake early, catching the other driver off-guard. The other motorist is liable for the accident because they were following too closely, but you might have been able to avoid the collision if you were driving at the speed limit.
Alternatively, you might slip and fall at a grocery store because a worker nearby failed to spot a spillage and place a wet floor sign. However, you were texting on your phone, and eyewitnesses did not see you look up, which might have caused you to see the hazard and take evasive action.
These are real scenarios, and while they have little impact on the types of compensation you can recover in a personal injury claim, they can affect how much compensation you recover.
Georgia adopts a modified comparative negligence law. This doctrine allows accident victims to recover compensation if they are partly responsible for the accident that caused their injuries — as long as their percentage of liability lies below a fixed cap. In Georgia, this is 50%.
The attribution of fault is determined by a jury, and the compensation awarded is then reduced proportionately.
For example, if a jury determines that your economic and non-economic damages total $400,000, but they also find you 20% liable, you will receive the remaining 80% — $320,000.
However, if you are found to be 50% or more responsible, you will not recover any compensation.
This Georgia personal injury law makes it vital to avoid admitting fault after an accident. You might innocently apologize despite your accident not being your fault, but insurance companies will use your words against you as an admission of guilt to minimize their liability and get away with paying you less than you deserve.
Related: Dos And Don’ts After The Crash
Why You Need a Personal Injury Attorney
Navigating the legal system when you’re injured or you’ve lost a loved one because of someone else’s negligence is emotionally and physically draining. When you hire an attorney, you have an advocate who will fight to secure the maximum compensation you deserve. Without legal advice, you might not understand the full range of damages you’re entitled to, or you may accept a lowball offer from an insurance company without knowing whether it will fairly compensate you for your future losses.
If you have been hurt in an accident in Georgia, our injury lawyers at The McGarity Group are dedicated to providing the best support and legal representation.
From our office in Buford, we help clients all over the state understand the different types of compensation they can recover and secure the payout they deserve so they can move forward.
Contact The McGarity Group today for a complimentary, no-obligation case review and determine whether you have a case.