In most California personal injury cases, there are two broad categories of damages that plaintiffs can seek to recover: “economic” damages (also sometimes called “special” damages) and “non-economic” damages (also known as “general” damages). Economic damages represent the direct, easily-calculated costs you have incurred as a result of a personal injury. They include expenses like medical bills and lost wages. Below, we explain what non-economic damages are, how juries, lawyers, and insurance companies try to calculate them, and some of the laws that govern their recovery in California. If, after reading this post, you have questions about whether you are entitled to recover any kind of damages because of a personal injury you’ve suffered,
contact the personal injury team at Golden State Lawyers to schedule a free consultation with a member of our team.
Non-Economic Damages Defined
The term “non-economic damages’’ refers to that class of damages in a personal injury claim that you do not determine by financial charges, expenses, or losses contained in documents. They encompass a variety of very real damages that result from personal injuries, such as:
- Emotional distress
- Physical pain and suffering
- Loss of enjoyment of life
- Damage to relationships with family members or spouses
- Pain and suffering
- Loss of consortium
- Diminished quality of life
- Permanent disabilities and impairments
- Permanent disfigurement
Injury victims often focus on the financial losses that follow an injury, including their medical bills and lost income. However, it is always important to consider these intangible - yet very real - non-economic losses when seeking compensation for a personal injury. Your California personal injury attorney can ensure that these non-economic damages factor into your insurance demand and fight to prove what your claim is fully worth.
What Personal Injury Claims Might Involve Non-Economic Damages?
Non-economic damages do not apply to only certain types of personal injury cases. These damages stem from the nature and severity of the injury and not the cause of the injury or liability. That said, these damages can arise any time a serious injury results from the following, among many others:
- Car accidents
- Drunk driving accidents
- Truck accidents
- Motorcycle accidents
- Bicycle accidents
- Pedestrian accidents
- Slip and falls
- Defective products
- Medical malpractice
All of these incidents can lead to serious injuries that come with non-economic losses.
It Takes Experience to Put a Value on Non-Economic Damages
These are difficult categories to value. Often, money is an inadequate substitute for the harm non-economic damages aim to fix. After all, what is the appropriate amount to award for extreme physical and emotional pain felt by a burn victim whose face was permanently disfigured? What is the correct amount of money to compensate the grieving parents of a child tragically killed in a car accident? What dollar value can we put on the agony of a family who watched their loved one slowly die from toxic exposure to chemicals in the workplace? Reasonable people can come up with widely differing numbers for these and similar types of non-economic damages. Subjective values, beliefs, emotional sensitivities, and a sense of justice drive their assessments. As a result, non-economic damages may, in some cases, far exceed the amount of economic damages. Consider, for instance, a case where a defective toy explodes and kills a small child. The parents’ economic damages in such a case are small (the cost of the toy, perhaps), but their non-economic damages are limitless. Not surprisingly, courts and juries often struggle to calculate fair and rational non-economic damage awards, and they can vary widely from case to case. This is why having an experienced attorney capable of successfully presenting non-economic damages is critical. Many of the cases in which the law firm of Golden State Lawyers has achieved
multi-million dollar results included significant non-economic damage awards.
How Are Pain and Suffering Damages Calculated in California?
There is no fixed formula for calculating pain and suffering or other non-economic damages in California. Juries must consider the evidence and calculate a reasonable, common-sense value (which explains the variation referred to above). Some factors that tend to affect the relative value of non-economic damage awards from one case to the next include the duration and severity of a person’s injuries, the degree to which the injuries affected the person’s (or surviving family members’) day-to-day life, and what constitutes a full recovery from the injury or loss. Here’s an illustration of the challenges juries can face. Imagine a jury presented with the task of determining damages for two people, a driver and passenger of a car involved in an auto accident. For simplicity’s sake, assume neither of these people caused the accident. The collision crushed multiple bones in the driver’s legs. A series of agonizingly painful surgeries left her with disfiguring scars running the length of both legs and with one leg now two inches shorter than the other. Before the accident, the driver was an aspiring Olympic springboard diver and part-time model. Not only are her dreams of going for gold now crushed, but she cannot bear wearing a swimsuit due to her disfiguring injuries. Her modeling jobs have disappeared, and since the trauma of the accident, she has developed debilitating anxiety and depression. The passenger suffered a spinal cord injury in the accident, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He, too, was an aspiring elite athlete and has seen his dreams of playing pro soccer evaporate now that the injury confined him to a wheelchair. Unlike the driver, however, he can shift his athletic focus to wheelchair marathons and is already in training to compete at a high level. He maintains a positive outlook on life. Unfortunately, research has shown that life may be significantly shorter than if the accident had not happened; doctors think the passenger’s paralysis will shorten his lifespan by at least ten years. If you were on this jury, to whom would you award more non-economic damages? The driver, who still has use of her legs, but whose disfiguring injuries functionally end her career and contribute to her mental health struggles? The passenger, who will likely never walk again in his shortened life, but who may yet win a marathon? Both of them equally? Would your opinion change if their genders reversed, or both were the same gender? If one had small children, but the other didn’t? If, instead of being aspiring athletes, they were both in their 60s and were
former athletes? There are no “correct” answers to these questions, which is why we said above that reasonable people can come to different conclusions about them. Based on experience and past results, a skilled California personal injury attorney can often estimate a range of potential non-economic damages for a case (though that is no guarantee of a recovery). Most importantly, a capable trial attorney can help a jury appreciate and put a dollar value on non-economic losses.
Does California Cap Non-Economic Damages?
Generally no, with one exception. In medical malpractice cases,
California law limits non-economic damages to $250,000. In all other personal injury cases, a plaintiff who presents sufficient evidence of pain and suffering and other non-economic damages has no cap on the amount of a potential award. Having no cap means that injury victims can seek the full value of their non-economic losses, so you want a personal injury attorney who knows how to calculate the complete amount that you deserve.
What Are Punitive Damages?
Punitive damages (also known as “exemplary damages” in California) constitute a special, separate category of non-economic damages. Whereas other non-economic damages aim to compensate personal injury plaintiffs for the harms they suffered, punitive damages have a different purpose. As their name suggests, they aim to punish the person or company that harmed the plaintiff and to deter similar harmful actions in the future.
Under California law, courts may award punitive damages “where it is proven by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant has been guilty of oppression, fraud, or malice.” What does the law mean by those terms? It means that the defendant either:
- Intended to harm the plaintiff;
- Willfully and consciously disregarded the plaintiff’s rights or safety;
- Subjected the plaintiff to cruel and unjust hardship in conscious disregard of the plaintiff’s rights; or
- Intentionally deceived the plaintiff.
There is no fixed cap on punitive damages under California law, but they must bear some relation to the size of the economic and non-economic compensatory damages the jury awards. An experienced California personal injury lawyer can help you determine whether it is appropriate to seek punitive damages in your case.
How Do Insurance Companies Deal With Non-Economic Damages?
Like juries, insurance companies also routinely face the challenge of determining non-economic damages in California personal injury cases. Unlike juries, however, insurance companies have vast records of past awards to base their estimates on and a strong financial incentive to limit the size of future awards whenever they can. When a person with a personal injury files a claim seeking compensation from an insurance company, the insurance company should (but doesn’t always) take non-economic damages into account in offering a settlement. The settlement offer will be less than what the insurance company thinks a jury might award because there’s always a chance a jury
won’t award that much, and the insurance company knows the old saying that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Regrettably, insurance companies almost routinely, drastically undervalue or ignore non-economic losses. That is why hiring a skilled, resourceful, respected personal injury lawyer to conduct insurance settlement negotiations can make a huge difference in the size of a settlement offer. In negotiating an insurance settlement, an experienced California personal injury lawyer collects evidence and presents arguments to the insurer for why the odds are strong that a jury will award the lawyer’s injured client a high figure for non-economic damages. The insurance company will take into account not just the strength of those arguments but also the lawyer’s track record for winning large awards from California juries. Simply put, the better the lawyer, the higher the likely settlement offer.
When injured Californians seek our help at Golden State Lawyers, they often express frustration at how difficult it can be to estimate their non-economic damages. The discussion above aims to ease some of that frustration by explaining the challenges involved in making those estimates and by showing how the best way to increase the odds of a large non-economic damage award is to retain a lawyer with experience and a strong reputation for recovering large awards. If you or a family member have suffered a personal injury in California, you may seek economic and non-economic damages. Don’t wait to seek legal help. The statute of limitations in California for taking legal action on a personal injury is generally
two years.
Connect with the experienced, respected personal injury lawyers at Golden State Lawyers, APC, today at
(408) 279-4222 or complete
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