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Protecting Your Future Compensation After Injury

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Whether a personal injury case goes to trial or can be settled out of court, you need to consider the full potential costs of living with your injury. Your injury could heal over time and not be a significant, long-term problem, but even the smallest chance of long-term disability needs to be considered and plotted out through a budget. Here are a few injury compensation concerns and strategy points to help you understand the full potential of your injury claim.

Start With Immediate Costs

The most obvious costs should make up the core payment if you win a case that goes to trial or settle out of court, and you shouldn't accept a dime below that amount, even after taxes. This means your immediate medical bills, lost wages, and property damages related to the incident.

Calculating these costs can be a challenge, but is easier than calculating possible disability costs. For immediate medical costs, you will need your final medical bills from all medical professionals visited, meaning that you may need to wait until treatment is completed or get a confirmed bill ahead of time.

This can be difficult as some near-future costs can sneak up. A medical professional may not see a slight complication such as an infection or a bone break getting worse, and the evidence might not appear until you're already settling for a set amount.

For lost wages and damaged property, you need receipts and statements from the people who pay you. If you work for a regular wage/salary, it's easy to get your payment information and translate it to a set amount over time. If you're a freelancer who has to search for working opportunities, the only easy payment will be any current projects that were interrupted. Proving the loss of potential freelance projects is difficult, and will most certainly require a personal injury law firm to make a compelling argument.

Difficult Future Costs

Getting a settlement that matches a long-term disability is the true, difficult core of personal injury law. You will likely need to aim high, but you also need to prove that the high amount is realistic to avoid being tied up in court by your legal opponent.

If you've seen commercials from lawyers promising millions of dollars, that's not inaccurate. The problem with those claims aren't that the dollar amount is inaccurate, but because you may not be able to use all of that money for personal goals. The millions are often future medical costs, as you have to think about how much physical therapy, medications, scans, and insurance will cost for the rest of your life.

Instead of hoping for millions that you can spend as you please without hurting your health, go after the damage to your career. If your injury or extended disability affected your job, why stick to that job? Vocational rehabilitation can help you move to another job or even attend college for higher-qualified positions that could put a lot of money in your pocket for honest work. 

Vocational rehabilitation may be easier to accept than trying to stack on thousands of dollars for pain and suffering, and your legal opponent can make that happen without necessarily spending money on tuition out of pockets. Contact a personal injury law firm to discuss the complex payment rates after injury, along with other compensation strategies.


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