Boise Motor Vehicle Accident Lawyers

Lost Income and Loss of Earning Capacity

If you are unable to work because of your injuries, you are entitled to claim the income you lose. In addition, if you have a disability that affects your future earning potential, you are also entitled to recover monetary damages for loss of the income you would otherwise have earned.

For example, let us say that you can no longer do the specific job you had at the time of the car accident or other injury, but you find a job within your physical limitations that pays less than your previous job. In this case, you would be entitled to recover not only the income you lost from the old job, but also any future income you lose because you had to take the lower-paying job. If you are self-employed and your injury makes you unable to do your job, you may need to hire someone to replace you. You may be entitled to compensation for the extra money you pay to that person during your recovery.

In addition to your lost income and loss of future earning capacity, you may be entitled to recover any loss of benefits, such as health insurance, pension plans, bonuses or other benefits directly associated with your employment. An experienced personal injury lawyer will help you determine all of your financial losses so you can seek compensation for those losses. We may need to hire experts, such as a vocational expert (an expert in work) or an economist to address this issues for you. These experts will review your financial and medical records, then calculate and predict the economic losses you have suffered from the accident. If you are self-employed, you can prove your economic losses through tax returns and other business documents.

General or Non-Economic Damages—(Pain and Suffering)

Another part of your personal injury claim is the way your injuries affect your daily life — what is often referred to as your pain and suffering.  It includes those elements but that does not capture the entire area of damages.

Idaho law provides that you can recover noneconomic damages for:

1. “physical and mental pain and suffering, past and future”;
2. “impairment of abilities to perform usual activities”;
3. “disfigurement caused by the injuries”; and
4. “aggravation caused to any preexisting condition.”

These damages are different types of damages from those you would claim for your economic losses or physical injuries. For example, here in Idaho someone who suffers chronic pain after an injury is entitled to be compensated for that aspect of loss.

Physical pain is a sensation and suffering is a mood or emotional experience. Pain is the awareness, through a stimulus in the brain, of something that could damage your tissues and is followed by a feeling of discomfort or unpleasantness. By contrast, suffering is an emotion that could be considered the opposite of happiness or enjoyment, and involves cognitive awareness of an unpleasant situation, or a lack of the pleasure the victim could have expected had it not been for the injury. Suffering could involve many emotions, including depression, anxiety and humiliation. For example, suffering could be embarrassment and anxiety from a disfiguring facial injury, an amputation, incontinence, paralysis or another injury that severely limits the victim’s life activities.

It is the job of an experienced personal injury lawyer to help you prove specifically how your injuries have affected your life and your family. The ultimate goal of a personal injury claim is to obtain the maximum possible compensation, so you may return to your life as it was before the accident. Although injuries make that impossible in some cases, you are entitled to seek compensation for every injury you suffer.

The compensation offered in our system is designed to fix the things that can be fixed, make better those things that can be made better and to make up for what can’t be fixed or made better.  It is the goal of a personal injury lawyer to help you obtain the fullest and fairest compensation permitted by the law.

Loss of Consortium

Idaho law also allows the spouse of an injured person to recover damages as well, even if the spouse was not injured. This is called a loss of consortium claim.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines “consortium” as the “conjugal fellowship of husband and wife, and the right of each to the company, society, and cooperation, affection and aid of the other in every conjugal relation.” Loss of consortium includes not only material services that you may lose because of a spouse’s injury, but such intangibles as society, guidance, companionship and sexual relations. Usually, you should only make a loss of consortium claim when one spouse has been seriously injured, and that injury has had a direct negative effect on the marital relationship. Generally, you cannot make a loss of consortium claim if you are merely living with the injured person. A marital relationship, and sometimes a parent-child relationship, is essential to making a loss of consortium claim.

Sometimes, the non-injured spouse, at the direction of an experienced personal injury lawyer, can present compelling testimony at trial. This helps convince a jury that an accident has affected not only the marital relationship, but also the family. Juries sometimes empathize with the spouse who was not injured and better appreciate how the injuries have affected the marriage and the family.

But such damages are only available in compelling circumstances.  After all “for better or worse” is expected to mean something.   Only an experienced lawyer can help you determine whether you should add a loss of consortium claim to your personal injury claim.