There are many individuals who slip and fall in places of business. They may also fall on the sidewalk outside. It happens often enough that some personal injury lawyers focus their entire practices on these cases.
Your settlement amount may increase if you require surgery after a slip-and-fall accident, and we will talk about that in detail in the following article. You should know the basics surrounding this concept if you are ever in this situation.
Common Scenarios Where This Might Happen
Let us imagine a hypothetical for a moment. You’re going to the grocery store, and you slip and fall on a small spot of ice right in front of it. You severely injure your knee.
You take some pictures or video with your smartphone of the place where the accident occurred before notifying the store’s management. You immediately feel that you might have to file a lawsuit, so you want those pictures or videos for evidence later.
You’ve done a couple of things in this scenario that can help you possibly collect money later. You’ve documented the site where the accident occurred, and you’ve also notified store management, so they’re aware of it.
When you go to the emergency room, the hospital’s medical staff does some imaging. They see that you’ve torn some ligaments in your knee. When you speak to an orthopedic surgeon during a subsequent visit, they inform you that getting surgery to repair the ligament damage gives you your best chance to recover fully so that you can resume your normal life.
That’s the kind of scenario where you will probably want to sue the store in front of which you fell. You might also sue them if you fell inside the store. Either way, though, you’ll try to hold the store liable. In the personal injury legal niche, a lawyer would call this a premises liability lawsuit.
How Can You Hold the Store Liable?
To collect any money from the store in which you fell, or if you fell in front of it, you will need to establish that there was a duty of care that the store had to protect its customers, and it was negligent because it failed in that. In this instance, maybe your lawyer will claim that the store should have known about the ice in front of the entrance. They had plenty of time to put salt down to try to melt the ice, but they did not do so.
If you can hold the store liable, then you can probably force a settlement offer. If the store refuses to settle, then you might get money from a jury’s verdict if the trial ever gets that far.
How Much Additional Money Might You Get if You Require Surgery?
In these kinds of personal injury cases, you will attempt to collect money from two different categories. You will try to recover economic damages and non-economic ones.
Economic damages include things like the cost of any medical bills and any lost wages if you had to miss work for a while you recovered. Non-economic damages will cover things like your pain ad suffering or loss of consortium.
It’s sometimes difficult to figure out exactly how much you should ask for in damages for non-economic losses. Your lawyer can help you in this area. They might look at precedent from similar cases when determining a number that makes sense.
However, it’s usually considerably easier to put a figure on your economic losses. That’s because you can simply tally them up and demand that the responsible party reimburse you for them.
That’s what will happen if you need surgery after a slip-and-fall in a store, or in front of it, in the instance we described. Maybe you have health insurance that paid for some of the cost of your knee surgery. However, perhaps you still had a copay after the surgery for multiple thousands of dollars. For something as expensive as surgery, that’s not farfetched at all.
You’ll Try to Get Economic and Non-Economic Damages That Seem Fair
While the number to repay you for non-economic damages might seem a bit arbitrary, how much you can try to get for your economic losses shouldn’t present much difficulty. You simply add the cost of your surgery copay to your additional medical bills and lost wages. You will also want money for things like medication, physical therapy appointments, and anything else required after the operation.