Calculating past and future damages

The goal of your personal injury lawsuit is to fully compensate you for what you have lost after you were injured due to another party’s negligence or bad acts. To recover the full amount of money you deserve in a personal injury lawsuit, you need to seek compensation not only for the costs you have already faced at the time you file your suit, but also those you will continue to face in the future.

Economic damages

When you have been injured, you are affected in many ways that can be calculated as costs. The law refers to these costs as damages. To be fully compensated for what you have lost, you must calculate your damages and present them to court.

Some of these damages are considered as purely economic and can be fairly easily documented in court. For instance, you can present your hospital bills to document your medical costs. You can present your pay stubs to show how much money you lost as a result of not being able to return to work.

However, it’s also important to calculate how these damages will continue in the future. In cases involving permanent injury, you may need a lifetime of medical care. To be fully compensated, you must estimate how much your future medical costs will be.

A permanent injury such as those affecting the spine or brain can also affect your earnings capacity for the rest of your life. You deserve to be compensated for that future loss of income.

Noneconomic damages

Texas law also recognizes certain types of noneconomic damages, such as physical and mental pain and suffering, physical impairment, disfigurement, loss of enjoyment in life and many more. These losses cannot be documented as easily as a medical bill, but they will have a profound effect on your life, and you deserve to be compensated for them.

In a case involving permanent injury, these losses will continue to affect you for the rest of your life. To be compensated fully, you must calculate how much of an effect they will have on you.