Your damages for any personal injury that you suffer are divided into what is known as ‘general damages’ and ‘special damages’. General damages compensate you for your pain, suffering and loss of amenity. In essence, general damages compensate you for the injury itself. It may seem difficult to understand how a value can be placed on an injury. For example, how is it possible to quantify in monetary terms the value of a leg that has been broken, a hand that has been amputated, or an eye that has been lost? How much are hands, legs and eyes worth? The courts do, however, place a value on injuries, normally being guided by a publication known as the Judicial Studies Board Guidelines. These Guidelines set out the amounts that should be awarded for different kinds of injuries. The figures used are quite arbitrary, but they are useful to the courts in assessing how much an injury is ‘worth’.
Special damages are not about assessing the value of the injury itself. Instead, special damages are intended to compensate you for the financial losses you suffer as a result of your injuries. If you need to take time off work because of your injuries and sustain a loss of earnings as a result, or if you have to pay for physiotherapy, then these are the kinds of things that you can recover special damages for. One of the solicitors in our directory will be able to give you full details of what you can claim.
The amount of damages you can recover will obviously depend on the severity of your injuries. If you are a passenger in a vehicle which is struck from behind and you suffer whiplash, but do not need to take any time off work, your claim may well be limited to general damages of no more than a couple of thousand pounds, depending of course on the severity of the injuries. However, if you are so seriously injured that you need to be kept in hospital for weeks on end and your career suffers as a result, you will probably have larger claims for both general damages and special damages. Your injuries will be more severe and therefore justify a higher award of general damages, and your financial losses may be greater because of the severity of your injury, leading to a higher award of special damages.
The defendant in a personal injury action may be keen to pay you as little as possible. You may be made an offer of compensation by the defendant which would actually under compensate you for your injuries. Please contact one of the solicitors in our directory to make sure that you get what you are entitled to.