Texas law gives you certain rights if another person or a business harms you. Under personal injury statutes, you can file a civil lawsuit for the losses you suffer because of another party’s illegal activity or negligence. For example, someone causes a car crash and you have medical expenses that are more than the insurance that person carries, you could take them to court to seek the balance of your hospital bills.
Many of the consequences you will experience after a personal injury incident like a car crash will be economic in nature. You will have actual bills from the hospital and weeks of wages that you missed out on because you couldn’t work. Those economic damages are easy to validate and to put a price on when filing a lawsuit.
Before you go to court, you need to also consider the non-economic losses that you may have suffered and include them in your lawsuit.
What kind of non-economic losses can you seek?
Pain and suffering
If someone caused an injury that made you suffer extreme pain, you may have a right to claim compensation for that experience. The emotional and psychological damage caused by that suffering can also be a consideration. The trauma of an extreme injury can alter someone’s personality and potentially affect their quality of life and even their future earning potential.
Although it can be difficult to put a reasonable financial figure on the pain that you have suffered, including a claim for it in your lawsuit can increase the compensation that you eventually receive.
The impact on your household or family
Although you can include these as non-economic losses, the impact of your injury on your family or household will have a verifiable financial value. Your injury may prevent you from providing the services that you usually do for the people you love. Whether you always change the oil for your family members or have been the primary caregiver for your children for years, the services that you provided around the house are likely worth thousands of dollars a year.
If you have to hire someone else to do those same tasks, it will be prohibitively expensive in some cases. Establishing the fair market value of the services that you can no longer provide and requesting their value in a lawsuit can allow you to seek a more appropriate amount of compensation given the long-term impact the injuries will have on your life.
Setting a reasonable value on the losses you have suffered will help you pursue a successful personal injury claim in Texas.