Damages in a Motor Vehicle Accident: South Carolina Car Accident Lawyer Explains Pain and Suffering
While most motor vehicle accidents cause fender benders, scratches, and dents, others can cause personal injuries. Some of these personal injuries can be quite serious, resulting in permanent damage, disability, and possibly leading to wrongful death. Victims who are seriously injured in a motor vehicle accident occurring in South Carolina may be entitled to compensation for their injuries in various ways.
For instance, the law allows victims to recover economic damages, such as medical bills and lost wages. While these can be large amounts, often the most significant award of damages in a motor vehicle accident is for pain and suffering.
However, most people involved in a personal injury accident do not know what pain and suffering is, when they can get it, and how it is calculated. Call an experienced South Carolina car accident lawyers for the answers when this happens to you or a loved one.
At David Blackwell Law, our personal injury law firm is dedicated to helping innocent victims and their families who have suffered due to the negligence of another person, business, or government entity.
Whether you have been injured in a slip and fall, hospital mistake, dog bite, or especially in a motor vehicle accident with a car, motorcycle, truck, bus, or any other vehicle, our experienced South Carolina car accident lawyers can help you recover money for pain and suffering. We offer FREE consultations and only get our attorney’s fees paid after you get paid in a settlement, verdict, or another type of award. Learn more about how we can help you during a FREE consultation by calling 803-285-0225.
Understanding Damages in a South Carolina Car Accident
Pain and suffering is a type of “damages.”
Under the law, damages are the relief that a party to a lawsuit can recover in court, settlement, or arbitration. There are many different types of damages, and what a party may be entitled to depends on the type of case. In personal injury cases like car accidents, there are two general types of damages known as economic and non-economic.
Economic Damages
Economic damages are those which are reasonably calculatable. This includes compensation for:
- Medical bills
- Lost wages
- Property damage
- Lost future earnings if unable to work in the same job
- Burial costs and funeral expenses, and
- Related types of damages that are compensable.
Noneconomic Damages
Non-economic damages are not easily determined and cannot be calculated using some type of formula. Examples of non-economic damages include:
- Pain and suffering
- Loss of Enjoyment of Life
- Loss of consortium
- Emotional harm
- Punitive damages, and
- Other harm caused in a crash.
What is Pain and Suffering?
Pain and suffering is a type of non-economic damage that is not easily calculated. It is meant to compensate a victim for their conscious pain, agony, suffering, and feeling of pain due to an accident. A basic example would be the agony a person feels when breaking a leg, including the pain from putting pressure on it, casting, and the ache that comes with an injury such as a broken bone.
Measuring pain and suffering is difficult to do.
There is no formula, and everyone’s case may be different. When assessing pain and suffering, it is broken into two parts, past, and future.
Past Pain and Suffering
This measure of pain and suffering values a victim’s conscious pain and suffering from the moment of the accident until the verdict, settlement, or another type of award. It is meant to value everything that has been felt already up to payment.
Future Pain and Suffering
In contrast, future pain and suffering is an estimate of the amount of pain and suffering a person will endure in the future.
The future is measured based on a person’s life expectancy from an actuary table or through expert testimony.
The parties will either settle for what they believe a reasonable and fair amount of compensation will be for these years left, or a court or jury will determine it.
How Much is My Pain and Suffering Worth After a South Carolina Car Accident?
Since pain and suffering is a form of non-economic damages, there is no way to calculate your pain and suffering by putting it into a computer. The South Carolina Supreme Court has held that “Pain and suffering have no market price. They are not capable of being exactly and accurately determined, and there is no fixed rule or standard whereby damages for them can be measured. Hence, the amount of damages to be awarded for pain and suffering must be left to the judgment of the jury, subject only to correction by the courts for abuse” (Edwards v Lawton, 244 SC 276 [1964]).
But what we do know is that the courts generally try to keep the compensation awarded to victims reasonable and relatively common. This means evaluating what other plaintiffs may have received in similar cases with similar injuries, demographics, age, and locality of the lawsuit. However, the only true way to know what your case is worth is agreeing in a settlement or receiving a court award such as a jury verdict or bench decision.
Do You Have Significant Pain and Suffering After a South Carolina Car Accident? We Can Help
Pain and suffering is often the largest factor in determining the total recovery a person will have in a lawsuit. That means that a bulk of the money recovered will be for pain and suffering. Since there is no formula or way to just plug in numbers, but rather pain and suffering must be proven and could vary by how experienced a lawyer is, it is crucial for a victim and their family to have an experienced South Carolina car accident lawyer like ours at David Blackwell Law to help prove your case. Call to schedule a FREE consultation to learn how we can help you recover pain and suffering.
