Do You Have a Valid Personal Injury Claim?

Suffering an injury in an accident can prevent you from working, forcing you to attend doctor’s appointments and undergo rehab instead of taking the family vacation that you have been anxiously awaiting. Besides costing you financially, a personal injury can impede long-term mobility and even undermine your relationships with family and friends.

At Mette Law, our personal injury attorneys have been helping individuals in Harrisburg, PA, recover damages for accidents that were the fault of others. We also provide information about financial recovery following a personal injury.

What You Must Prove in a Personal Injury Case

To recover damages in a personal injury case, you must show that you suffered harm due to another person’s negligence. Typically, the most challenging element to prove in a personal injury case is causation. You must establish that the other person’s lack of care directly caused you harm.

Let us examine these components as applied to a slip and fall case in Harrisburg, PA:

• Duty of care: Under Pennsylvania law, property owners owe the highest duty of care to patrons (known as “invitees”). A restaurant, grocery store, or other commercial establishment owner must keep the premises free of hazards that are discoverable through reasonable examination of the premises.
• Breach of duty: Either by failing to take care of a property defect or by failing to warn a customer about a hazard, a store owner violates their duty to use reasonable care toward a patron.
• Causation: A causal link between the property owner’s actions and your sustained harm must be drawn. For instance, failing to clean up a spill resulting in a customer falling would establish the element of causation in a slip-and-fall case.
• Damages: Due to the accident, you must have sustained lost wages, medical expenses, pain and suffering, and other compensable losses. Damages may be tangible or intangible.

Damages in a Personal Injury Claim

Besides establishing liability, you must demonstrate the actual losses you have sustained. Actual or compensatory losses include economic and non-economic damages. Below, we discuss the differences between each.

Economic Damages

Also known as special damages, economic damages are any pecuniary losses that take money out of a person’s bank account. A personal injury case may include lost wages, medical expenses, and property damage.

Non-economic Damages

Also known as general damages, non-economic damages are intangible losses that impact your quality of life. Common non-economic damages in a personal injury claim include pain and suffering, infliction of emotional distress, loss of consortium, loss of companionship and society, and disfigurement.

Punitive Damages 

While compensatory damages compensate the injured party, punitive damages are designed to punish the wrongdoer. Also known as exemplary damages, punitive damages are awarded when the defendant displays egregious misconduct or reckless disregard for the safety of others.

While there is no cap on punitive damages in most personal injury cases in Pennsylvania, punitive damages are capped at 200% of the total compensatory damages in medical malpractice cases. Even if you believe the other person’s behavior was egregious, you cannot recover punitive damages without compensatory damages.

Guidance in Recovering Adequate Compensation

Knowing which damages you are entitled to is best left to the discernment of a personal injury lawyer. While economic damages are easily quantifiable, non-economic damages are more subjective. Mette Law uses the multiplier method to calculate non-economic damages, which assigns your pain on a severity scale of 1.5 to 5.

This figure is multiplied by your total economic damages (lost wages, medical expenses, etc.) to estimate non-economic damages. Since these intangible losses can impact the rest of your life, forever robbing you of the joy you once knew, non-economic damages are often more significant in most PI cases.

Reach Out to Our Personal Injury Lawyers Today

With nearly 400,000 cases being filed each year and 62 million people seeking medical attention for their injuries, personal injuries are a leading cause of disability in the United States.

Our personal injury attorneys in Harrisburg, PA, have years of experience helping injured individuals regain financial security. Whether through filing an insurance claim or litigation, we work tirelessly to advocate for the compensation you deserve. If you want to learn the worth of your accident claim, contact us online or call (717) 232-5000.