Hi, I’m Roger Ghai of the Ghai Law Firm here in Kennesaw, Georgia. I practice in metro Atlanta, particularly in Cobb County. I wanted to talk to you today about your economic and non-economic damages that you might sustain if you’re involved in a motor vehicle wreck. Economic damages of course would be such things as your medical expenses, transportation costs for Uber or Lyft or car rentals. It would also be in some instances if it was a death case, funeral expenses. You’ve got lost wages, medical expenses, and those are the basic … lost wages, your medical expenses, and maybe prescription expenses. Of course, that fits into medical expenses.
Those are your economic damages to a large extent. The non-economic damages are a little bit more difficult to quantify and that falls in the realm of pain and suffering. Pain and suffering can mean actual pain and suffering. Okay. Some variables for that might include whether that’s going to be permanent or not. In other words, you might have this condition for the rest of your life. If you’ve sustained either a herniated disc or bulging disc or God forbid, some other type of catastrophic injury, of course the pain is suffering could go on for the remainder of your life.
How we calculate that is based on what we call the mortality tables, which is the life expectancy tables. If you’re a young person and you were involved in a catastrophic accident yearly on, the number of years that you’re going to live is going to be quite substantial depending on … even if you’re a man. Men tend to live shorter timeframes than women. Nonetheless, whether man or woman, you’re going to have a long time of having to endure that pain and suffering.
The pain and suffering can encompass things such as fear because of the accident, which of course is a mental and psychological issue. Sometimes clients after motor vehicle accident actually have to see a psychologist so that we get that element of the damages documented, pain and suffering of course. Maybe it’s even the ability to not do the same job that you did before because the injuries has rendered you physically incapable of doing that.
You might have a differential in lost wages. In other words, you were able to do a job at $50,000.00 a year, and it was a manual labor job, but now you’ve got to do more of a desk job and that’s a $30,000.00 a year job. Those are the types of damages that you can recover in a case. They are probably other ones depending on the particular circumstances of your case that you might have. If you have questions about what you’re entitled to be compensated for if you’ve been involved in a motor vehicle accident, please feel free to call my office at 770-792-1000.