If you’ve decided to file a medical malpractice suit, you may be wondering how large a settlement you can expect to get. Every medical malpractice case is unique and requires a thorough investigation of how the medical malpractice has financially and physically affected the patient’s life. Read more to learn about how your medical malpractice lawyer will help you determine your settlement amount.
Ask a Medical Malpractice Lawyer: How Large a Settlement Can You Get From a Malpractice Suit?
Damages
To answer the question of how much you can get in your settlement (that is, your reasonable settlement amount), your lawyer will first identify the trial value for your case and then estimate your chances of winning at trial. Taking your medical malpractice case to trial puts you at risk of getting no compensation, but settling your case guarantees you some justice.
The reasonable settlement amount is what your attorney will attempt to get when settling is your best option. To determine how large the amount of the settlement value can be, they will assess all of the damages you’ve incurred from the medical malpractice. All damages are either economic or non-economic, and the amount you could get from your malpractice suit depends on each type of damage and its severity. More extensive and severe damages will mean more compensation.
Economic Damages
Economic, or “special,” damages are the losses that can be precisely calculated to the dollar. Some economic damages are easy to calculate while others require more investigation and expertise.
Lost Earnings
Your medical malpractice case has inevitably taken you out of work for an extended period. To calculate how much you could get in a settlement to compensate for lost earnings, all you do is figure out how much time you’ve lost and then add up all of the money and employment benefits you would have earned if you had been able to work throughout that time.
Future Lost Earning Capacity
This is more complicated to calculate and involves considering how much time you have left in your life to work (work-life expectancy) and how much work you will be able to do in the future. If you will not fully recover, you cannot fully return to work. Your lost earning capacity is the difference between the amount you would have continued to earn without the injury and the amount you will reasonably be able to earn in the future.
Present Value
This complicated value is related to your lost earning capacity. It is essentially a calculation of how much your future income would be worth today – that is, it’s how much money you’d need in the bank today if you were paid the rest of your work-life salary.
Medical Bills
Economic damages include the amount of money you’ve spent on medical bills so far. And if your injury will demand future medical attention, your settlement value may include compensation for those future medical bills, too.
Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages cannot be calculated to the dollar like economic ones. These damages include much more subjective types of harm, so the amount you receive in your settlement will depend on proving how severe the damage to you and your family’s life is.
Pain and Suffering
Pain and suffering include the physical, mental, and emotional discomforts that have resulted from the malpractice. Physical pain is the discomfort that arises from the injury and the subsequent medical care you’ve needed to receive because of it. Mental and emotional effects can range from anxiety to loss of enjoyment of life.
Physical and non-physical suffering often depend on one another, and your attorney will help you assess the degree to which the medical malpractice has caused your suffering to determine how large a settlement you may be able to get.
Loss of Consortium
Loss of consortium claims include painful marital losses that have resulted from the malpractice. Loss of companionship and spousal support is a specific type of emotional anguish that is difficult to quantify financially, but your settlement amount could include it as part of non-economic damages if it applies to your case.
Damage Caps
Many states have laws in place that set limits, or “caps,” on the amounts of damages that can be awarded in malpractice cases. Medical malpractice attorneys in Maryland will help you identify if your losses would hit the state limit.
Maryland’s cap only applies to non-economic damages. Maryland’s cap in 2021 was $845,000, and the historic increase to the cap is $15,000 per year. However, this cap may be larger if the medical malpractice case involves wrongful death with more than one beneficiary.
Adding It All Up
After reviewing all pertinent bills and documents, witness testimony, and consultations with financial experts for more extensive and complex damages, your attorney will be able to assign a value to every type of damage. Once they have all of these values and take the damage cap into account, they will add everything together to determine exactly how large your settlement value will be.
There you have it: an explanation of all the factors to consider to answer the question of how large your settlement value can be in a medical malpractice suit. It is a complicated process, so you should talk to an attorney to determine what compensation you are entitled to in your pursuit of justice.