Updated: 2/9/2022
If you’re injured and it is someone else’s fault, you might be entitled to bodily injury compensation. However, you might need to hire a personal injury law firm to help you actually get the money. Insurance companies and other parties involved are often reluctant to pay out the full amount, so they will try to avoid paying as much as possible.
If you’re injured and trying to focus on recovery, you might not be able to fight these decisions. However, accident compensation lawyers know exactly how to handle these negotiations.
The average cost of bodily injury claims can vary, but they often seek damages to cover medical bills, missed work, and other problems caused by the injury. This accident injury compensation helps you to get back on your feet.
A lawyer can communicate with insurance companies on your behalf, using their training and experience to get through any roadblocks the company might put up. This makes a lawyer a good investment after an accident, even if you think you’d be better off fighting the insurance companies yourself.
Damage awards in personal injury cases are for the purpose of compensating the injured person for the losses that he or she suffered as the result of the accident and injury. These generally include things like loss of ability to work, lost wages, medical expenses, and pain and suffering. Though damage awards vary case by case, here are the top three damage awards for personal injury cases.
1. Medical Malpractice
Of all personal injury litigation, medical malpractice has the highest median damage awards, at $600,000. Medical malpractice usually involves a person becoming injured while receiving medical care or suffers injury as a result of a doctor’s negligence. Usually in these types of cases, there has to be a clear and official patient-doctor relationship, there has to have been an injury, and the injury has to have been a result of the doctor’s proven negligence.
2. Product Liability
The second highest median damage awards in personal injury litigation is product liability, at $300,000. This usually involves a person becoming injured as the result of using a product. There are three main types of product liability cases. One is a failure to warn that causes and injury, another is that there were design defects that made the product dangerous, and the last is that there were defects during manufacturing that made the product dangerous.
3. Traffic Accidents
The most common cause of personal injury lawsuits in America is traffic matters. This includes things like car crashes, motorcycle crashes, pedestrian accidents, and more. There are around 5.5 million car accidents, 60,000 pedestrian injuries, and 35,000 auto-related deaths each year in the United States.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of personal injury cases. Other common cases include things like slip and fall accidents, but none of them have as high median damage awards as medical malpractice, product liability, and traffic accidents. For more information see this.
