Whenever insurance adjusters seek to determine the figure to quote in an initial offer to someone with a personal injury claim, each of them must consider the nature and extent of the claimant’s medical expenses. What factors determine the nature and extent of those same expenses?
Special damages, another term for medical expenses, reflect the type of injury suffered by the claimant.
The insurance industry puts all injuries into one of 2 categories. Some are labeled “hard”; others are categorized as “soft.” Most hard injuries can be diagnosed by means of an x-ray, or an imaging technique. The soft injuries lack that feature, and do not burden the victim with a permanent medical condition.
The extent of the claimant’s pain and suffering also affects a potential settlement’s value.
Some injuries produce a level of pain that an insurance company would struggle to deny. For instance, the general public has learned about the amount of pain that is produced by a separation or dislocation of the vertebrae.
Victims that must deal with an especially painful sprain need to keep a record of the frequency with which that painful sensation appears. The same record should also give the duration for each reported sensation.
A personal injury lawyer might uncover another way that an injury’s existence could work to affect the size of a potential settlement.
The driver of an impacted vehicle might discount the chances that any of the vehicle’s occupants suffered a severe injury. That is often the case, if the driver was not injured, and none of the occupants voiced a complaint during the moments following a collision.
Still, it helps for each occupant, even young children to undergo a physical examination. In that way, their physician could be made aware of the forces that had been put on their body. A physician’s awareness of those earlier forces could prove helpful, if any of the occupants were to experience a late-appearing symptom.
For example, a child might suffer a traumatic brain injury. Early symptoms, such as headaches might go unnoticed. Later, a dizzy spell might alert a doctor to the presence of an accident-related injury.
Personal injury lawyers in Fort Erie understand how to deal with an insurance company, when a client, or someone in a client’s family has shown signs of slow-to-manifest symptoms. A lawyer’s efforts could help a client that had felt pressured to accept an offer.
Personal injury lawyers know that no offer should be accepted until all the injured victims have reached the point of maximum medical improvement (MMI). The same lawyers share that fact with their clients. In that way, an attorney-client team could work together, in order to maximize the value of a potential settlement.