After an accident, most defendants will seek three major areas of damages: medical bills, lost earnings, and pain and suffering. These lost earnings should include claims for wages you already missed, along with any reduced or lost wages you will face going forward.
You can claim lost wages and income from insurance or from a lawsuit. We usually calculate them by looking at what money you made before the accident and what your expected career track looked like. Then, we compare that to how things are now. If you only missed work during your recovery and are back to 100%, lost wages are easier to calculate, but we can also project lost earning capacity from disabilities or even in wrongful death cases.
Call our Las Vegas personal injury lawyers at Mitchell Rogers Injury Law at (702) 702-2622 for help recovering damages in your case.
Can You Sue for Lost Wages?
Lost wages are one of the most common damages people sue for in an injury case. These are considered “special damages” or “economic damages” in that each damage has a special, specific value based on what monetary harm you suffered.
Typically, lost wages account for both past and future damages. This means that if your injury kept you out of work, but you are back to normal now, you can get damages for everything you already missed. If your injury has an ongoing effect on your earnings, we can also claim that.
Can You Get Lost Wages in an Insurance Claim?
Insurance claims are often filed after an injury instead of going straight to court. This is most common in car accident cases, where victims can file with the at-fault driver’s insurance or even with their own insurance if they have certain first-party coverages.
In these claims, insurance will often pay for lost wages, but the company might refuse to cover all of it. Your own insurance typically pays only a percentage of lost earnings after an accident, and the defendant’s insurance company might simply refuse to pay at all if they don’t believe their policyholder was at fault.
In any case, you should always talk to a Nevada personal injury lawyer about what your lost wages are worth, since you cannot reasonably rely on the insurance company to get it right the first try. They usually try to undercut damages or settle for low amounts instead of paying the full amounts you are owed.
Determining Pre-Injury Wages
Before we can know what wages you lost, we need to know what wages you were making before the accident. This means not only looking at your average wage, but assessing your future career.
In a simple claim for lost wages, the injury victim was working for a certain wage, then they got injured and stopped working, then they returned to work at their prior wage. In these cases, we simply need to look at what your average wage was before the accident, since there is no ongoing change.
Some workers have simple hourly wages or salaries with predictable weekly incomes. Others work seasonally, do contract or “gig” work, or are self-employed with sporadic clientele. In these cases, we can look at a long-term average to find your typical pre-injury wage.
Many cases also involve a loss of future income, which means we need to look at how much you would have made going forward if it weren’t for the injury. This means assessing the likely raises and promotions you would have achieved. It also means looking at when you would have retired if your career hadn’t been interrupted by your injury.
Determining Post-Injury Wages
Once we know what you made before the accident, we can look at how the injuries affected that amount. This requires looking at your current and future wages.
If you were kept from work for a brief period, then returned at full capacity, the only effect was those days of lost wages. This means we can multiply your average wage by the number of days/weeks/months missed and find the full value of lost wages.
With more complex cases, victims face ongoing disabilities. These could allow you to work at a reduced capacity or reduced wage, or they might stop you from working altogether.
If you cannot work at all, then we can take the projected income you would have made before the injury and claim all of that as lost earning capacity damages. If you work at a reduced wage, we can run the same kinds of projections to see what you will make now that you have an injury, and subtract that from your original expected wages.
This might seem complex to take your full life into account, but many injury cases do affect your full life, and future lost earnings must be accounted for to receive full damages.
Calculating Lost Wages in a Wrongful Death Case
When suing for wrongful death for a loved one in Nevada, you can claim their lost income as part of your case. This, however, is limited to the share of economic support you would have gotten.
That means that if you are the victim’s spouse, you would have likely gotten support for the rest of your lives together. A child might instead only be able to claim their share of lost support through age 18 or into early adulthood.
In these cases, we still need to calculate what the victim would have made if they had lived and kept working, then account for what share of that you are personally entitled to.
How Do Defendants Afford to Pay for Lost Wages?
Defendants often cannot afford to pay for your lost wages out of pocket, which is why insurance is so important. If you are suing a big company or corporation, they may be able to afford your damages themselves, but everyday people usually need to rely on their insurance coverage to pay for your injuries.
Even if the insurance company refuses to settle, they are still usually the ones paying for the defendant’s lawyers and damages in court. That means there will often be money to cover your damages in cases involving car accidents, injuries on someone else’s property, and injuries caused by a business.
Call Our Nevada Personal Injury Attorneys Today
For help, call Mitchell Rogers Injury Law today at (702) 702-2622 and talk to our Enterprise, NV personal injury lawyers about your potential case.