Calculating Pain and Suffering in Florida

After a serious physical injury in Florida, people often wonder how they will move on with their lives. Families may be devastated by the loss of income, bills may be piling up, and then there’s the actual pain. Pain can be intractable and relentless. It can keep you from enjoying family, spending time with loved ones, and it can even affect your mental health, leading to anxiety and depression. You’ve probably heard the term, “Pain and Suffering,” but a lot of people don’t really understand what this term means and how the law compensates for it.

At Roman & Roman, P.A., we have decades of experience helping injury victims pursue compensation for physical pain and suffering. So if you’ve been hurt by someone else’s carelessness, call us to speak with a lawyer who can answer your questions and help you make sense of your rights.

What Are Pain and Suffering? 

Historically, American law has held people accountable for the harm they cause. If you go into a business and break something, you must pay for it. If someone gets drunk and runs into your vehicle causing you injuries, they must pay for it. Over many years, the Florida Supreme Court developed standard instructions that are given to juries in order to help them understand what can be compensated and how.

Under Jury Instruction 501.2, Florida courts will typically instruct a jury to consider pain and suffering to include the following elements:

• Disability or physical impairment
• Disfigurement
• Mental Anguish
• Inconvenience
• Loss of capacity for the enjoyment of life

The instructions tell jurors to consider these things as they occurred in the past or as they are expected to occur in the future.

How Are Pain and Suffering Calculated? 

The same jury instructions clarify that jurors in a personal injury case do not have access to any specific or “exact” measurement for such damages. Indeed, the law specifically chooses not to define a method of calculating pain. Instead, the instructions just tell jurors that “the amount should be fair and just in the light of the evidence.”

This leaves ordinary individuals from the community in a position to hear all the evidence and decide what is fair and proper under the circumstances. Florida law codifies the belief that regular Floridians are the best judges of what is reasonable.

If There’s No Specific Calculation, How Can a Victim Improve the Value of a Case? 

This is the key issue in many injury claims, and this is why it is so important to worth with a skilled and experienced team of injury lawyers who understand local juries and how they decide cases. At Roman & Roman, P.A., our firm has been representing injury victims throughout the Tampa Bay area since 1985. As a family of devoted legal professionals, we want to help you and your family recover maximum compensation in your case.

Call today for a free case evaluation, and learn more about how we might be able to help you recover compensation for your pain and suffering.

Resource:

floridasupremecourt.org/civ_jury_instructions/2010/500/501(2).rtf