What Happens If I Lose My Ability to Work After an Accident?

Every day, thousands of people are injured in accidents due to no fault of their own. Car crashes, slips and falls, trucking accidents, warehouse accidents, factory fires, offshore mishaps, and countless other types of accidents leave people out of work and with a pile of medical bills. Whether or not you’re injured at work, getting seriously hurt will immediately subject your family to financial hardship. 

If you’re permanently unable to work, what can you do? 

Louisiana law recognizes that accidents put people out of a job, or may even rob them of their careers forever. In many cases, an injury may only allow a person to work for a couple of hours a day, severely shrinking their income. To whatever degree you’ve lost the ability to work, the law allows you to recover your lost income not just in the present, but all the future losses you’ll suffer. 

Can You Recover Future Lost Wages & Income?

One of the most basic claims after an accident is a claim for wages lost due to the accident—time spent in the hospital or recovering. It’s fairly simple to calculate: take all the time you spent out of work and figure out how much you would have earned in that period. 

However, in a serious accident, you should be able to claim not only the wages you’ve earned but the wages you might’ve earned in the future if it weren’t for your injuries. Let’s say you’re making $35,000 a year as a warehouse worker. If you’re severely injured in a forklift accident and left permanently unable to work, your lawyer could claim $35,000 per year in losses for the rest of your life, based on average life expectancy. 

Additionally, your attorney could hire an economist to calculate how much you should receive to account for inflation over the course of your life. They could also the career paths of other people at your company to calculate the raises you might have received over the course of your career. 

When you call a personal injury attorney for a free consultation, ask them if these are part of their investigative process. The fact is, when you’ve lost the ability to work, you can’t afford to go with the wrong lawyer. The wrong lawyer might leave you with barely enough to live on for the rest of your life, but a thorough and experienced trial attorney could make sure you’re financially secure forever. 

Our firm won the largest single-injury verdict in Louisiana history. We’re the right kind of law firm. Call Clayton, Frugé & Ward today for a free consultation at (225) 209-9943.

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