How Your Actions Can Reduce Your Personal Injury Award

In personal injury claims, every injury's victims hope is to get the maximum possible award. What most victims don't know is that what their actions or lack of actions have a significant role to play in the determination of their awards. For example, these three actions can easily minimize your settlement or award:

Failure to Mitigate Damages

Whenever you are claiming personal injury damages, the defendant (via their insurer) will confirm whether you took the necessary measures to limit the damages after the initial accident. This is because the law expects you to take relevant measures to ensure that the only injuries you suffer are those as a direct result of the accident and not your carelessness.

The most obvious ways of mitigating damages in an injury case is to seek prompt medical care. Therefore, you shall be deemed to have failed in this respect if you tried at-home treatment first and only sought medical care when your injuries intensified. In such a case, the defendant can successfully argue for your medical damages to be reduced so that you aren't compensated for the injuries you suffered during your attempts at at-home treatment.

Contrary Evidence on Social Media

Social media pages may be meant for sharing, but you should be limited on what you share after an accident. The opposing party can argue for a reduction of your damages if they can get their hands on evidence that disapprove your claims.

Consider an example where you are claiming severe back pain after a rear-end accident in a parking mall. If you then post pictures of you working in your garden or carrying heavy bags of shopping, it would be easy for the concerned parties to conclude that your injuries are, at best, not as serious as you claim. This may be the case even if you are truly injured and in pain.

Exaggerating Your Claims

Lastly, you might also shoot yourself in the foot if you are caught lying about important aspects of your case. This is even more likely if it is a jury trial; juries are notoriously wary of lying plaintiffs. Lying makes you unreliable, and once you are deemed unreliable, even the truths coming out of your mouth will be suspect. Therefore, don't say you had a compound fracture on your leg if you really had a simple fracture; call a spade a spade.

If you have never dealt with an injury claim before, it's possible that you don't know everything you should or shouldn't do to maximize your claim. Get help from an injury attorney, like Richard Glazer Law Office, who has dealt with cases similar to yours.


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