Obviously, someone that has been injured in an accident could expect to suffer a good deal of pain. Some pain will get felt soon after the collision. Other pains may emerge later. Such chronic and long-term pain could be associated with an impairment. An enduring painful sensation can dim forever a victim’s chances for further employment.
While insurance companies seldom object to reimbursing an accident victim for lost days of work, an insurer might feel reluctant to compensate for loss of earning capacity. What is the reason for that reluctance?
Why insurance companies feel reluctant to compensate for loss of earning capacity
A loss of income claim is usually easy to prove. Of course, someone that is self-employed and gets involved in an accident may have some difficulty with proving the full extent to which his or her income was lost. A loss of earnings claim is less easy to prove. A loss of earnings claim is often larger than the loss of past income. The length of the period during which the victim expects to be deprived of the ability to hold a job could exceed by far the length of time during which the victim has been recuperating, following the recent accident.
A situation in which an insurance company’s worst fears might be realized
This would be a time when a family got rear-ended at an intersection, on their way back from a vacation. One of the young passengers developed the symptoms that are characteristic of a traumatic brain injury. A trip to a pediatric neurologist showed that she did indeed have a traumatic brain injury.
That severe impairment would cause her to develop further complications, and to need repeated surgeries. Hence, she faced a bleak future, in terms of the positions that she might be able to fill. Moreover, her resume would definitely showcase the times when she had not been working.
In other words, the young girl’s earning capacity had been lowered even before she managed to show up for her first day on the job. The defendant’s insurance company could be charged with covering that loss of earning capacity. That would amount to covering a period of 40 years, the average time of an adult’s employment.
A personal injury lawyer in Spruce Grove could work with an expert on economics, in order to predict the victim’s probable loss of income, due to the absence of a strong earning capacity. The economist’s figures could be presented to the defendant’s insurance company. Of course, if the young girl’s family never hired a lawyer, that same family would lack the ability to make much of a claim.