What Are the Legal Options for Recovering Lost Wages After a Crash?

After a car crash, you may find that you are unable to work for days, weeks, or even longer. In some rare cases, people cannot go back to work at all. You have the right to recover damages, including your lost wages, after a car accident if someone else is at fault, but how do you go about doing so? The first step should be to contact a San Antonio personal injury lawyer who can give you detailed advice based on your situation.

Legal Options for Recovering Lost Wages After a Crash

Contact a San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer

A personal injury lawyer is the best first step for recovering everything that you’re owed, including your lost wages. A lawyer will be able to talk through your case with you and help you evaluate what to ask for. Your lawyer can do an investigation to establish liability and help you find all the evidence you need for proving exactly how much you’ve lost in wages or salary. You’ll then need to prove that these losses were directly related to the accident, which your lawyer will help you do by putting the evidence together into a compelling and coherent story.

At-Fault Laws in Texas

Texas is an at-fault state when it comes to car crashes. This means that whoever caused the crash is liable to pay all the losses of the victims. These losses and damages include all economic and non-economic losses, including lost wages.

In most cases, of course, it is not an individual driver who pays out these losses but their insurance company, and Texas law does require all drivers to carry insurance. If the other driver is insured, you’ll be dealing with their insurance company to get reimbursement for your lost wages.

The unfortunate reality is that many drivers do not have insurance, and in fact, Texas has a higher rate of uninsured drivers than most states. For this reason, it’s also wise for drivers to carry their own Uninsured Motorist (UM) coverage, which will cover them in the event they are hit by an uninsured or uninsured driver. If you were hit by an uninsured driver, your first step to recovering lost wages would be to file a claim with your own UM insurance coverage.

Modified Comparative Fault in Texas

Modified comparative fault is a legal doctrine establishing that anyone 51% or more responsible for an accident cannot recover any damages, while anyone 50% or less responsible can, but their final damages will be reduced by the same percentage as their fault. In many car accidents, there is more than one entity partially to blame, and this can complicate getting your lost wages compensated.

First, if you bear any fault in the accident, you will lose out on a certain percentage of your damages, no matter how great they may be. Second, if there are multiple parties holding different degrees of liability, it can sometimes be difficult and time-consuming to work through the degrees of fault that each party holds, particularly if fault is in dispute and each party is trying to minimize its own liability while maximizing that of others. It’s very important that you have a lawyer at this stage to make sure you’re protected.

Proving Your Lost Wages

“Lost wages” as a category of damages covers all income that you’ve lost because you are unable to work after a car accident. This will obviously include hourly wages or salary, but it can also include bonuses, tips, self-employment income, overtime pay, commissions, and vacation or sick days that you have lost. Beyond that, you can also claim for a lowered capacity to earn income if you have been injured so badly that you cannot return to your previous job or a job at a similar wage.

It can require some complex calculations to come up with the correct number, and you may need a lot of evidence to prove certain things. For example, if you want to claim for missed overtime, you will have to provide evidence showing how much overtime you would typically have taken during the time you were laid up. Then, you’ll need proof that overtime was available during this time, so you could’ve taken it had you not been injured. If you have an ongoing disability, you will likely need expert medical witnesses to testify to your inability to return to work and explain whether you will be able to retrain to a new profession and how long that might take. Your lawyer will have a network of expert witnesses of this type who can help you in your case.

At a minimum, you will usually need to provide pay stubs, wage statements, tax returns, and employment contracts to prove your loss wages. You’ll also need to be able to prove the extent of your injuries and why they prevent you from working, and this may require not only your medical bills and records but also testimony from your employer or from coworkers documenting your inability to work or showing why it’s not feasible for you to return to the job that you previously had.

Calculating Lost Wages

To calculate what you should be paid, your lawyer will typically start by multiplying your hourly wage or the amount of salary you were making per day by the number of days that you were impacted by the injury. If you are unable to work at all, you would be reimbursed at the full rate. If you were able to return part time or to restricted duty at a lower wage, you would be paid the difference between what you were able to make before the accident and what you are making now.

If you have been injured so badly that you cannot work, your lost earning capacity has to be calculated into the future. This can require other expert witnesses, since this is not just a matter of how much you make: you need to factor in the possibility of what raises and bonuses you could have expected as you progressed in your career and figure from your age and overall health how much longer you would have had in your working life without the accident.

If you’re bringing a wrongful death lawsuit after the death of a loved one, you can also claim lost wages here, too. In this case, you would be seeking to receive the amount that your loved one should have earned over the course of the rest of their life. The total here will depend on their age and health at the time of the accident.

Loss wages are just one type of damages that you can claim after a car accident, and it can be difficult to properly calculate the full worth of a car accident personal injury claim. For experienced help with your case, contact the Joe A. Gamez Law Firm, PLC in San Antonio for a free consultation on your case. We offer experienced and aggressive representation to anyone in the San Antonio area. We know how hard these events are for victims and can even meet you at home or in the hospital and help you with everything from finding a doctor to accessing a rental car.