Exploring Your Claim To Pain & Suffering

Dealing With The Insurance Company’s Low-Ball Calculations

Insurance companies always try to lowball their calculations for pain and suffering. That’s why it’s so important to have an experienced trial lawyer who can help you through your personal injury claim. Otherwise, the insurance company will pull a random number out, which might even sound like a lot of money at first…

However, if you have an experienced trial attorney helping present your case and documenting the evidence that your doctors have developed through your medical records, we can highlight certain things, such as:

• The level of pain you are experiencing
• The progress that you made
• How long it took for you to recover from your injuries
• What your limitations were throughout that recovery and moving forward
• And more…

An insurance company may not look at the evidence of your pain and suffering without an attorney to help you show it. Of course, there’s more to your claim than what’s related to your medical treatment – but the insurance company’s job is to assess the value of your case as low as possible. As a result, you can miss out on a huge portion of the compensation that you deserve.

For instance, it’s not just that you had whiplash or a strained neck. It’s that maybe you couldn’t even lay down to sleep, so you had to sleep in a recliner for a month. Maybe you were put on light duty at work and were consequently paid less. The list can go on and on.

This is why our firm does things things like add the loss of daily living enjoyment to your case – because this loss adds value to your claim. Making sure that you’re compensated for every part of your claim is instrumental to getting you as close to where you were before the accident as we can.

Emotional Pain

We ask our clients to consider whether they have emotional pain as a result of their accident. This is one of the injuries that’s harder to prove, but it is still compensation that you may be entitled to. To do so, you would need to go to a mental health specialist and talk to them about the kinds of emotional pain you are suffering from. We use those records as evidence to help document and prove your case.

For example, if you’ve suffered a very serious car accident, you might experience post-traumatic stress disorder. Some of the signs of PTSD include being frightened easily, experiencing negative thinking and negative moods, avoiding certain activities and places, having flashbacks, having difficulty sleeping, and substance abuse.

For example, many people have difficulty getting back into a car after a car accident. Here, we strongly recommend that you seek mental health treatment for two reasons. The first reason is so you know how to deal with your emotional pain, so you can recover from it, and so you can process it appropriately. The second reason is your emotional pain is documented in your records. Those records are the evidence that we use to argue for compensation for the emotional pain you’re experiencing.

Emotional Pain Is Different For Children

You should also be aware that emotional pain can affect children. We had clients with a couple of children who were in a very severe car accident. After the accident, the children were injured and couldn’t process what happened. One minute they had been whole, and the next minute they were not.

These children believed that if they were to get into any car, something bad was always going to happen. They had to be taken to a medical professional to help them realize that it was an accident and that something bad wasn’t going to happen every time they got in a car. As children, they just were incapable of processing the trauma from the car accident.

Of course, we worked to make sure that this client’s claim found coverage to make sure that the children could have access to mental health services – and extra compensation for the trauma that they suffered as a result of the accident.

The Pain & Suffering Scale

The difficulty in valuing pain and suffering is because each person is different, and there is no scale to measure pain and suffering. However, when you hire an experienced personal injury lawyer, we know how to analyze your records for what can be measured on that pain and suffering scale. We also know you are a person, not just numbers and figures on a medical record. Thus, we look to show the insurance company what you experienced both objectively and subjectively – as a person who experienced these hardships.

The more information we can provide about your condition during and after your recovery, the better compensation you’re going to receive. While it is still complex because pain and suffering do not come with a price tag, it’s our job to search through all the information that your healthcare providers and you give us to calculate a pain and suffering amount. Then, we explain what we’ve seen happen in other cases, what our experience is, and give you advice based on what you tell us your ideal outcome looks like.

With the guidance of a skilled attorney for Personal Injury Law Cases, you can have the peace of mind that comes with knowing that we’ll make it look easy. For more information on Personal Injury Law in Arkansas, an initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (479) 337-7077 today.