Special Damages: Understanding How the Figures Add Up...

If you are seriously injured you probably won’t find anything special about special damages. These are the calculated "hard" costs the injured person incurs.



In the insurance world damages are the injuries, lost income and damaged property suffered by the claimant. Special damages is also the phrase used to represent the dollar figure each of these things represent.

Everything that effects the final payout falls under the category of general damages. Special damages, though, are things that are usually represented by actual documented figures. When an injury requires medical treatment the injured person has expenses that range from ambulance fees to doctors' fees to medication. These damages all come with a bill so there's no guesswork involved in deciding how much it actually costs.

Aside from medical special damages, there are also damages that occur more indirectly. Lost wages is the big one here. If the injury causes a person to miss a week of work then the person liable for those injuries must compensate the lost pay.

For less serious injuries there isn’t a lot more to do then simply add up all of those figures and make a demand.

For more serious injuries the damages get bigger. When the injury is something that will be long lasting or permanent the insurance company has to find a way to determine how much that actual disability is worth. That figure will have to be added to the special damages that already exist. (You'll definitely want to retain a lawyer for this type of case.)

These extra damages include everything from future medical bills to lost opportunities. Even less serious injuries cause pain and that is a damage in and of itself. For long lasting injuries the pain might recur for years. If there is a visible scar then that will result in a lifetime of potential embarrassment, which is a form of suffering. A dollar figure has to be negotiated and attached to all of these things and added to the list of special damages.

Punitive Damages

The damages aren’t done yet. While it seems like the list of damages is already long, punitive damages still haven’t been considered. Punitive is a word that means "to inflict punishment." In more serious and long lasting injuries it's the punitive damages that often cause the massive insurance settlements you read about in the paper.

Most of the time the dollar figure won’t get that high. Punitive damages are normally determined with a formula that multiplies the special damages 1.5 to 5 times - sometimes more. We'll look at this process a lot closer in a later chapter.

The last word on special damages and punitive damages, for now, is something that should be obvious...

The damages you claim in your personal injury settlement demand have to be one hundred percent related to the accident in question!

It can be clear to everyone that the other person was at fault but that still makes them responsible for no more then the damages they caused. Whether it's due to abuse of system, misunderstandings or wrong diagnoses, there are still a lot of claims brought forward that ask for compensation for completely unrelated injuries.

This is yet another reason why documentation is so important. The insurance company has a right to question whether or not injuries were pre-existing or happened after the fact.

Still have questions about special damages, general damages, or punitive damages? Click Here.


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