How Personal Injury Damages Account for Loss of Income
The lawyers of Tawwater Law Firm, PLLC put their clients first. Victims of serious injuries and senseless accident can turn to our Oklahoma City law firm for legal help. Our injury will use their years of experience in personal injury litigation and civil law to help ensure negligent parties are held accountable for their actions.
Injuries can have an impact on your job and overall career path. Because of this, damages in injury cases may take into account lost wages as well as impacted future earnings. Let's explain why this is important.
Serious Injuries Have Consequences
If you or a loved one is involved in a serious accident of some kind, it can have major repercussions that affect your life, your livelihood, and your overall sense of well being. It can take time to recuperate, eating into sick days and vacation time. Sometimes you'll need to recover without being at your job, which means the loss of wages you could have used.
Catastrophic Injuries Can Have Dire Consequences
When injuries lead to some form of lasting impairment or disability, the consequences are extreme and can lead to the loss of future earning. These scenarios tend to be extreme when they involve catastrophic injuries, such as the loss of a limb, partial paralysis, paraplegia, or quadriplegia. Even a traumatic brain injury can result in serious impairment of your mental faculties and motor control, making it difficult to accomplish certain tasks.
Should any of these injuries or examples occur, legal damages will be sought in order to cover the loss of immediate and future income.
Struggles Working After a Serious Injury
People who have been injured may notice major issues as they return to their jobs. They may not be able to perform all of the same tasks as they did prior to this injury they sustained. This could lead to issues with productivity. Some people will make a full recovery despite initial impact on productivity, while others may have to struggle in order to perform the job they did before they sustained an injury. This can potentially lead to reduced wages in the short term and the long run.
Changes to Your Career Path
When an injury impacts your ability to perform a certain task, it may be necessary to pursue w new career simply given your circumstances. This can be challenging given the learning curve involved. If you're starting from scratch in a new job, you may find it very difficult to begin anew, especially when you had plans and a path in your previous career that were thwarted by the injury sustained.
Total Inability to Work
When a catastrophic injury is severe, such as cases of quadriplegia or severe head trauma, you may no longer be able to work at all. In such cases, you will be living on disability as opposed to pursuing your career. This will be frustrating and troubling, especially if your career was promising and offered numerous financial advantages.
How Compensatory Damages Work
In civil cases, compensatory damages are sought in order to cover the material losses a person has experienced as a result of an injury. In addition to covering medical bills and damaged property, compensatory damages can also cover lost income as well as the loss of future earning. This is one way that an injury victim can receive some of the compensation they would have received from gainful employment had the injury or accident not occurred.
Calculating Lost Income and Future Earnings
Calculating the lost income and future earnings will involve estimates based on current wages, pay stubs, invoices, and so forth. As far as potential future earnings, these estimates can be made using average incomes of people in comparable positions and of comparable experience who work in the injured person's field.
Contact Tawwater Law Firm, PLLC
For more information about your legal rights and options following a serious injury or accident, it's important that you contact our team of personal injury attorneys today. The team at Tawwater Law Firm, PLLC is here to help you in your time of legal need.