Truck accidents can leave victims with numerous expenses that keep piling up. If you’re a truck accident victim, you should be aware of all the types of compensation you can seek through an insurance claim or lawsuit. Maximizing your compensation can make moving forward from your accident easier.
The following are the main types of compensation you may be eligible for in a truck accident case. Consult a Florida truck accident attorney today for personalized assistance in maximizing compensation.
Compensatory Damages
Compensatory damages are the sum the defendant owes you to directly compensate you for the accident. These damages may include economic and non-economic damages.
Economic Damages
Economic damages are direct monetary expenses from the accident. They often include costs like:
- Medical expenses: Economic damages can cover your past, current, and future medical costs, including medical bills, medications, treatments, therapies, and at-home medical equipment.
- Physical damage: The trucking company should also compensate for your vehicle’s physical damage in the accident.
- Lost wages: If you must take time off work while recovering from a truck accident, you can add these lost wages to your economic damages.
- Loss of future earning capacity: If your injuries have prevented you from returning to the same job or making the same amount of money you made before the accident, you can calculate your loss of future earning capacity as part of your economic damages.
- Permanent injury and disability: If your accident leads to permanent impairment, you can claim compensation to cover the expenses involved in this life-altering change.
Your Florida truck accident attorney can help you add all the economic expenses from your accident.
Non-Economic Damages
Compensatory damages also cover the expenses from your accident to which you can’t attach a direct monetary value. These may include more abstract or emotional losses, such as:
- Pain and suffering: While no amount of money can make up for the physical pain you’ve experienced from your accident, adding pain and suffering to your damages can compensate you a little bit.
- Emotional distress: Truck accidents aren’t just physically painful; they produce a lot of trauma, stress, grief, and other hard emotions in victims.
- Loss of enjoyment of life: Permanent injuries can prevent you from enjoying activities you once did.
- Disfigurement: Scars, marks, and other forms of disfigurement can also cause emotional distress that the defendant should pay you back for.
Punitive Damages
Some truck accident claims also warrant punitive damages, which punish the truck drivers or other at-fault parties for causing accidents that could have been reasonably avoided. You may be eligible for these damages if the driver was acting recklessly, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or purposefully putting other drivers in danger through their actions.
Your truck accident lawyer can help you determine whether to seek punitive damages. The state of Florida limits these damages, so they can be challenging to secure without skilled legal representation.
Wrongful Death
If someone died in your truck accident, their personal representative may be able to bring a wrongful death lawsuit against the truck driver or truck company. This lawsuit would seek compensation for all the surviving family members of the decedent and may cover expenses like:
- Medical bills
- Funeral costs
- Loss of income
- Grief
- Loss of companionship
Seek Compensation With the Assistance of Warner & Fitzmartin
The Florida truck accident attorneys at Warner & Fitzmartin are prepared to help you seek maximum compensation from the truck drivers and all other liable parties in your accident. Call us today at (561) 816-5983 for your free case evaluation.