- November 27, 2024
- Personal Injury
What happens in Kansas if you suffer an injury due to the negligent actions of another? If everything proceeds smoothly, you hire an experienced personal injury lawyer who helps you get fair compensation for the harm you incurred. But how can you tell if the compensation is fair? This is one of the key reasons that you want to consult a personal injury lawyer before trying to get compensation. An experienced personal injury lawyer at Palmer Law Group can assist with accurately calculating personal injury damages in Kansas. Determining the proper amount of these damages is a critical early step to getting the compensation you need to recover from your injuries.
Were you seriously injured due to the negligence of another party in Kansas? Our law firm has been helping injured parties get fair compensation since January 1980. Contact us today at (785) 233-1836 to learn how over 40 years of legal experience can help your case.
Economic Damages
The first type of damages that you can receive from a personal injury claim is economic damages. This is compensation for tangible losses or expenses you experienced because of the injury, such as medical bills and lost wages.
Gathering Records for Medical Bills
When calculating personal injury damages in Kansas, determining how much you should receive for your medical bills depends greatly on preserving your records. Every time you receive medical attention, the hospital or doctor will provide you with a bill. Depending on the hospital and your preferences, you may get a paper bill, an electronic bill, or both. Unfortunately, many people pay these bills and then promptly lose them or throw them away. This can make it more difficult to prove that you should receive compensation for the bill.
Our legal team can help you preserve bills physically and electronically. That way, when it comes time to present them to the insurance company, these records are organized and easy to submit.
Copies of your medical bills are critical to getting compensation for your medical expenses. Never throw away any bills; always store them somewhere safe and easily accessible.
Identifying and Proving Medical Expenses
While preserving bills is important, another important step is identifying all expenses involved with your medical treatment. This can be especially vital if you received any care from a hospital.
Typically, when you receive care from the hospital, you get a bill from the hospital and a separate bill from the doctors who treated you. In some cases, you may even receive additional bills from specific departments of the hospital. Even worse, these bills don’t always come at the same time. Sometimes, a doctor may wait weeks or even months to send a bill. Our legal team knows how to track down these outstanding bills so that you aren’t left paying them without compensation.
Finally, we need to prove that all of your medical expenses are related to the injury you suffered. This can require a physician to establish that your injuries were not due to any other preexisting conditions. Choosing physicians who have experience dealing with insurance companies can help in this regard.
Our team can help you identify the right local doctors for your injuries. An insurance company may try to deny your claim whenever possible to protect their bottom line, so if the doctor hasn’t indicated that your treatment is a result of a specific injury, the insurance company may decide that it isn’t responsible for compensating you for that medical care. This can result in a significant difference between the insurance company’s calculations of damages and your calculations.
Determining and Proving Lost Wages
Preserving records can also play a large part in accurately calculating lost wages in Kansas. However, you don’t receive a bill when you miss work. When you work, you receive pay, which is recorded by your employer. When you don’t work, you don’t receive a receipt indicating that you missed hours, at least not from most employers. Luckily, most employers do keep records of when employees miss work, even if they don’t provide you with those records personally.
With that in mind, there are two ways you can potentially prove that you missed work time. The first is to ask HR to provide you with a transcript of all hours or days you missed. Usually, your workplace can produce this type of document quickly. Alternatively, you can provide the insurance company with access to your pay stubs. Most workplaces track these digitally, which makes it easy to show that there is a pay gap. You will probably need your workplace to confirm the validity of that information, which is also typically a straightforward process.
Proving you weren’t paid isn’t enough, however. You also need to prove two more things. First, you need to show that the missed work was related to your injuries. The best way to do this is to get your doctor to attest, in writing, that you were unable to work due to your injuries. If you are being treated by a doctor who understands what insurance companies need, this should already be part of your medical records. Second, you need to show how much income you lost due to your injuries. This is often calculated by multiplying your hourly rate by the total number of hours you missed.
Non-Economic Damages
Perhaps the real challenge in calculating damages for a personal injury claim in Kansas is determining non-economic damages. This is compensation for the pain and suffering that you endured from an injury caused by another party. Insurance companies may try to avoid paying this compensation, so if you are not represented by experienced lawyers, you may not be offered any compensation for pain and suffering.
When calculating pain and suffering, we generally figure it as a multiplier of your economic damages. Thus, if your medical bills were $25,000 and you lost $10,000 in wages, we would request damages for pain and suffering as a multiple of $35,000. The multiplier is typically between two and five, depending on the circumstances of the injury. If we determined that three was a fair multiplier in this example, we would request $105,000 for pain and suffering.
Often, the exact value will involve negotiating with the insurance company. However, there is a crucial element to note about non-economic damages. According to Kansas law, the most money you can receive for pain and suffering from a jury award in a lawsuit is $350,000. Unfortunately, this means that if you suffer the type of injuries that result in hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in medical care, the lion’s share of the damages you will receive will be for economic losses rather than non-economic losses.
A skilled personal injury lawyer can accurately calculate non-economic damages and ensure you seek the maximum amount of all types of damages available under the law.
Contact Palmer Law Group After Suffering a Personal Injury in Kansas
When another party’s negligence causes you to suffer a serious injury, you deserve to be compensated for the resulting losses you sustain. The right legal team can guide you every step of the way through the claims process, helping you obtain the most compensation possible for your recovery.
Don’t shoulder the burden of expenses after an accident. Contact Palmer Law Group at (785) 233-1836 today to find out what compensation you may be entitled to.