Personal Injury : Pain and Suffering Related to Product Liability

2007-03-08 10:33:40

( Legal )



In a product liability case the aim of the jury award is to compensate

- Economic
- Non-economic

Losses, because of the personal injury the victim has suffered.

When you sue in a product liability case be sure to use an attorney with experience in this area to avoid attorney malpractice

The increasing numbers of these personal injury cases, as well as the increase in size of the monetary awards made by juries has become an issue of concern.

The area of most concern is that of non-economic losses (also known as pain and suffering) which is the major part of the awards made by juries for personal injuries, even though it is not very well defined and tends to be the most variable part of the award.

This is mostly because there is not a clear definition of what pain and suffering actually is, or how it is evaluated.

And so attorneys ask the juries to use a lot of subjective methods for compensation and juries don’t have many guidelines for their decisions, thus having wide discretion in their decisions.

Therefore pain and suffering awards differ largely case-by-case, and are considered to be highly subjective and unpredictable. This leads to unfairness in the legal system because injuries that are the same often get different awards. This not only confuses the defendants, but also has a negative effect on the innovation and manufacture of products.

Reform in this area has caused many states to limit the awards for pain and suffering. However this tends to disfavor young victims who don’t get compensation from other sources.

Another solution has been to create guide-lines that give a reasonable standard as to what pain and suffering awards should amount to- for example: defining the awards according to severity and age based on jury awards in the past. The guidelines would allow for flexibility on the part of the jury.

This assumes that jury response is not completely random, despite some variation.

In fact an analysis of the situation shows that although juries decide case-by-case, the decisions are not completely random and are related to:
- Economic loss.
- Type of injury.
- Severity of injury.

However despite this conformity, the awards for pain and suffering are often not appropriate and have to be considered in the light of what the goal of the compensation is.

The goal of compensation would be seen as being to give the victim money which would restitute to them the situation they would have found themselves to be in if they hadn’t been abjured – seen in terms of both economic and non-economic losses.

Economic losses might be:

- Medical expenses
- Wage losses
- Etc

Non-economic losses

- Pain and suffering

And is usually seen as the positive residual difference between the award the jury makes and the award given in terms of actual economic losses.

Not all victims even if their case is successful receive this kind of compensation.


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