While an accident might leave you with physical injuries, it might also cause deep emotional trauma that deserves its own compensation from a lawsuit in South Carolina.
In addition to their economic damages from an injury, victims may also sue for emotional distress. Non-economic damages, which are any subjective losses that do not have inherent monetary value, are compensable in injury claims, and our lawyers can help victims quantify their emotional distress. After calculating your intangible damages from an accident, our attorneys can file a complaint against the liable party, including compensation requests for your medical expenses, lost wages, and other out-of-pocket expenses. We can ensure your lawsuit gets filed on time and that you know your deserved recovery. This will prevent you from accepting bad settlements that don’t compensate you for your emotional distress or other damages.
Call Burriss Ridgeway Injury Lawyers at (803) 451-4000 for a free case assessment from our South Carolina personal injury lawyers.
Can Victims Sue for Emotional Distress in South Carolina?
When you file an injury lawsuit in South Carolina, you can request compensation for your non-economic damages, such as emotional distress. While getting non-economic damages is important, so is recovering compensation for the most consequential expenses from an injury, such as your medical costs.
Physical injuries cause considerable emotional distress for victims. For example, suffering a traumatic brain injury might cause permanent cognitive issues. Not only could this prevent a victim from returning to work at a meaningful earning capacity, but it could also affect their overall quality of life. Non-permanent injuries can also have mental and emotional consequences for victims, causing them to develop anxiety or depression while going through extensive treatments to heal.
The ramifications of burn injuries, limb loss, and other disfiguring injuries can be extreme. Victims might experience significant mental anguish throughout their physical recoveries, as well as actual physical pain that may be compensated. We can assess your loss of enjoyment of life due to an injury, potentially by conferring with mental health experts who have assessed you and are prepared to testify to your pain and suffering at trial.
Compensation for emotional distress is just part of the damages victims can seek after suffering personal injuries due to negligence. Our attorneys may be most concerned with your recovery of economic damages, as these losses can profoundly impact victims’ lives, financially speaking. Victims’ economic damages are sometimes used to calculate their non-economic damages, another reason why our lawyers must also know your actual expenses from an injury. For example, the multiplier method to calculate non-economic damages works by applying a multiplier between 1.5 and 5 to a victim’s total economic damages. Using this method, the greater a victim’s economic damages and the more severe their injuries, the greater their non-economic damages.
How Much Can You Recover When You Sue for Emotional Distress in South Carolina?
In most personal injury lawsuits, South Carolina does not limit victims’ recoveries when suing for non-economic damages or any other compensatory damages from a negligent party. That does not mean, however, that victims’ recoveries for emotional distress are guaranteed to be high.
Suppose your claim is against a negligent physician or hospital for medical malpractice. In that case, non-economic damages will be capped at $350,000 unless there is more than one defendant in your lawsuit, in which case the limit will increase to just over $1 million.
A recovery is not guaranteed regardless of whether or not limits exist on the compensation you can get for emotional distress. To suggest to the court how much we believe you deserve for your non-economic damages, our Columbia, SC personal injury lawyers may use one of two calculation methods. In addition to the multiplier method, we may use the per diem method. This works by assigning a daily rate to your pain and suffering and multiplying that amount by the number of days we anticipate you experiencing emotional distress because of your injuries. We can use the calculation method that best maximizes your non-economic recovery and request the resulting sum in the complaint we file with the court.
How to Successfully Sue for Emotional Distress in South Carolina
Non-economic damages are the most elusive for injury victims, and our lawyers can ensure that victims file their lawsuits on time and know the value of their claims so that they only accept settlements that properly compensate them.
File on Time
You cannot get compensation for emotional distress, or any economic damages for that matter, if you do not file your lawsuit within the statute of limitations. S.C. Code Ann. § 15-3-530 gives injury victims three years to initiate claims against negligent parties. Failure to file on time without citing applicable exceptions to the statute of limitations, like delayed discovery, would bar you from recovering damages of any kind from a liable party. When reviewing your case, our lawyers can confirm when your cause of action accrued, identify the filing deadline for your claim, and proceed appropriately so that we do not miss it.
Know the Value of Your Claim
Unfortunately, plaintiffs sometimes underestimate their non-economic damages, as their primary concern may be recovering compensation for concrete medical expenses or lost wages. Thinking they deserve less compensation, victims might accept poor settlements from negligent parties, ending their claims and preventing them from seeking additional damages. From the beginning of your case, our lawyers can estimate your claim’s value, track economic damages, and take the necessary steps to quantify and document your non-economic damages. We can assert the value of your claim during settlement negotiations, using mental health expert statements as leverage to get better offers. We can remind victims of their deserved compensation if defendants refuse to give fair settlements and help them prove liability for all of their damages at a trial.
Call Our South Carolina Injury Lawyers for Help with Your Claim
Call the Lexington, SC personal injury lawyers of Burriss Ridgeway Injury Lawyers at (803) 451-4000 for help with your case.
