What Is a Catastrophic Accident in the Legal Field?
A catastrophic accident causes injuries that last throughout the victim’s entire life or causes them to require special accommodations for that length of time. These accidents also cause permanent disability. They leave the victim with permanent scars, disfigurement or deformity and cause them to be unable to continue working in their current professions.
These are the types of injuries that the law ascribes additional compensation that one does not normally receive in personal injury lawsuits. That is because these victims need more money to compensate them for the extra time and expense required to pay for these injuries.
How Are Catastrophic Accidents Covered in the Legal Field?
Because the stakes are so high in catastrophic accident cases, you must hire a personal injury attorney to fight for adequate monetary compensation for you if you suffered a catastrophic injury. Your attorney will work to provide economic and non-economic damages for you. These include the following:
• Payment of your past medical bills and the bills that will come in the future. These include those for treatment in the emergency room, procedures to reconstruct injuries, payment for your surgeries, payment of your physical therapy visits, any inpatient hospitalizations, new medical devices, medical monitoring, rehabilitation, therapy, daily living assistance and assisted living care.
• Catastrophic compensation also may include pain and suffering, lost wages for the victim and the victim’s family, compensation for the inability to continue to earn a living, compensation for emotional difficulties, loss of consortium, property damages and wrongful death claims.
• If they are warranted, the court may award punitive damages. Punitive damages seek to punish the defendant for acting in an intentional, outwardly negligent and dangerous manner. In North Carolina, punitive damages are capped at three times the amount of the compensatory damages or $250,000, whichever is greater.
What to Know about Defense Routes for Catastrophic Injuries
The best thing is to have mitigation practices in place in the event that a catastrophic accident occurs. If you do this, you will have the best chance of having better outcomes after an accident. The mitigation practices you put in place now can keep the amount that the accident causes you as low as possible. For example, you can do the following now:
Loss Prevention
You can train your employees on processes and procedures that are meant to minimize the negative impact that a catastrophic accident may have on the organization. With this training in place, your employees will learn how to react quickly to a potentially catastrophic incident so that it does not turn into the worst kind of incident.
Plan for an Emergency Response and Crisis Management
You will plan the actions that you would like your employees to take in the event of a catastrophic accident. Take advantage of insurance brokers. They can help you conduct risk assessments so that you can determine what catastrophic events are likely to occur in your organization. At this time, you will be able to put together response plans for the crisis scenarios that your organization may encounter.