Very often, and probably more often than not, the question of ‘what is my personal injury claim worth’ can be boiled down to ‘what will I recover for future loss of income’. This is because, speaking very generally, claims for future loss of income tend to be the main driver of assessments of personal injury damages. Items such as what lawyers call “pain and suffering” being the amount awarded for one’s personal experience of an injury, tend to be on the low side due to government regulation.
So as personal injury lawyers trying to obtain the best possible value for our clients, we are usually very focused on what can be claimed for, as we call it, “future economic loss”.
Probably the easiest calculations of future economic loss occur in the most severe cases – when someone is so badly injured, they can never work again. In those cases it is essentially a matter of claiming all of the injured person’s potential future income from now until retirement age, with appropriate adjustments for possible promotions, changes of employment and so forth.
In cases less severe than that most severe case, it is often not that straightforward. Rarely, a client might have a very ‘neat’ situation where their hours or days of work and thus their income is reduced by a particular amount that is easily identified on a weekly basis which can then be projected forward into the future to claim the loss.
But a more common situation is a scenario where a person actually returns to full-time employment out of financial necessity and is having difficulty coping with the demands of that role, but is not actually losing significant income, or any income at all. In those cases by the time the loss is being assessed the injured person may have little to no actual on going loss, but there may yet be a significant threat to their employment in the future.
In these types of cases, future loss of income is not usually calculated by reference to an actual fixed calculation but is instead awarded on a ‘global’ basis. This is a discretionary amount that courts award to compensate a claimant for the disadvantage they may have on the labour market in future.
These amounts are usually not particularly large – an award of $100,000.00 for global future economic loss is quite significant, with many being considerably less than that. It is in fact difficult to predict precisely what might be awarded for global future economic loss from one case to the next. But to give the best chance of obtaining the highest possible amount for global economic loss is necessary to identify objective factors that indicate someone is struggling at work, such as:
- Taking days off work to cope with pain
- Having to leave work early on occasion
- Inability to perform certain tasks at work or requiring assistance to do those tasks;
- Requiring aids or equipment at work to assist with certain tasks;
- Loss of promotion opportunity;
- Having to take pain killers to get through each day; and
- Plans to change employment in future due to difficulties in current role.
This is not an exhaustive list and the effect of particular injuries on a given occupation must be assessed from case to case, but these are the types of factors that can make the difference between a significant award for global future economic loss and an insignificant one.
It is essential that you have an experienced personal injury lawyer on your side to maximise your claim for future economic loss.
