Once an insurance adjuster has been assigned to a filed claim, he or she works on estimating the claim’s worth.

For what damages could a claimant or plaintiff seek reimbursement?

• Medical expenses, including medication
• The value of lost wages or lost earnings
• The effects of a disability or a disfigurement of the victim’s body
• The loss of a family, social or educational experience: Something that had been scheduled, and could not be postponed.
• Pain and suffering: Victims that keep a record of their painful sensations have better luck with getting compensated for their pain and suffering
• Damaged property

Traditionally, insurance companies have used a damages formula, in order to calculate the worth of a given injury claim.

That formula requires performance of those tasks that assign a number to certain non-economic losses. Yet that same formula allows for consideration of the economic losses, as per personal injury lawyer in St John’s.

The adjuster must add up the total in each of the bills from doctors and other providers of medical services. That sum then becomes one factor in a multiplication operation. What is the other factor?

That other factor is a smaller number, one that normally falls between 1.5 and 5. That same number is meant to represent the severity of the reported injury. Whenever adjusters deal with a report about a catastrophic injury, that number/factor could be 6 or more.

Once the product from that multiplication operation has been calculated, it needs to be added to the value of the victim’s lost wages or earnings. The result of that final operation provides the adjuster with some indication, as to the size of the bid to present at the start of negotiations.

What else must an adjuster consider, before coming forward with that bid?

All adjusters have a superior, someone that guides and directs their decisions. A newer adjuster could be asked to limit the size of any payout that might be given to a claimant.

In addition, adjusters must consider the determination of fault. If both parties could be partly to blame for a given accident, then that would affect the value of each party’s claim. The nature of that effect would reflect the laws in the state where the accident took place.

In states the adhered to the principle of comparative negligence, the worth of a claimant’s case could decrease in proportion to the extent of his/her contribution to the accident-causing factors. That would be the case, for claimants that had contributed to less than 50% of those factors.

In states that follow the principle of contributory negligence, no person that helped to cause an accident has any right to seek compensation. The same holds true for anyone that produced more than 50% of the accident-causing factors.