Pain and suffering is one of the many different types of damages that can be claimed after an automobile accident. These claims commonly arise if you were in an accident caused by someone else in Tennessee and you are the one who has come away injured from the experience.
Special damages and noneconomic damages
Your medical bills and the cost of fixing your car are important factors to consider after you’ve been in a crash. But on top of that, there’s also the physical and emotional trauma that you’ve gone through from the experience, which is much more difficult to put a number on.
Once you’ve established that there was pain and suffering as a result of the accident, the bigger question is how much you can get from the damages. The amount of money you’ll be able to recover depends largely upon where you were when the accident occurred as well as the specifics of the crash. The particular jurisdiction may have a significant bearing on how the law is interpreted.
Pain and suffering is one category of noneconomic damages that may result from an accident. These are opposed to special damages that are related to specific economic harm. Although they’re not as easy to define and quantify as special damages, noneconomic damages are still important in personal injury cases.
How much can you get for pain and suffering?
Due to the subjectivity of pain and suffering, evaluating these types of damages in an unbiased way might not be possible at all. But some of the factors that are considered in an attempt to do so include how severe your injuries are, the part of the body injured and if you were scarred or disfigured in any way.
Also considered is how much time you’ll need to recover and whether the consequences will be ongoing. It’s not always possible to say for sure, but the likelihood is taken into account.
Some use the multiplier method for pain and suffering, which may be more straightforward and useful for your situation. This is done by taking the total amount of special damages and applying a multiplier to it. However, this method has been criticized for having results that may be misleading, and the multipliers are often arbitrary.
