Tom Dickerson
Tom Dickerson is a trial attorney and co-founder of Dickerson Oxton, where he focuses on personal injury, wrongful death, medical malpractice, and catastrophic injury litigation. Since launching the firm with Chelsea Oxton Dickerson in 2010, Tom has helped recover millions of dollars for injured clients through aggressive advocacy and courtroom experience. Known for his client-first approach, he is dedicated to standing up for individuals and families against insurance companies and large corporations.
Vehicle accidents affect many residents of the Kansas City area daily. Achieving fair compensation for the financial losses and negative personal impacts of those accidents is key to ensuring that accident victims are able to recover their footing, economically and in their private lives. Unfortunately, determining the fair value of claims arising from vehicle accidents can often be difficult, and injured individuals may find themselves receiving lower-than-reasonable settlement offers from insurance companies seeking to minimize their costs. A conversation with a Missouri car accident lawyer may help you gain a realistic picture of the value of your claim and your options for pursuing compensation. Call (816) 542-6599 today to schedule a consultation with the personal injury team at Dickerson Oxton.
What Is the Difference Between an Incident and a Car Accident?
In looking for information about how to handle vehicle accidents, you are likely to see car crashes referred to as “incidents,” particularly in materials describing the law enforcement reports typically filed after collisions. “Incident” is not a term most people use frequently in casual conversation, so it is natural to have questions about the relationship between the word incident and the vehicle accidents in conjunction with which it is sometimes used. This kind of clarification can be a special concern for individuals who are aware that even familiar words can often have specialized meanings in legal contexts.
Incidents as Interruptions
In the context of documentation relating to vehicle accidents, the key point to bear in mind is that any event that occurs on a roadway can be a traffic incident. In its most literal sense, the denotation of incident is essentially the same as that of event or occurrence. In practice, however, the connotations of incident make it more appropriate for certain ways of talking about collisions involving vehicles.
Why Use “Incident” for Vehicle Accidents?
Media traffic reports, as well as those completed by law enforcement officials, often refer to vehicle accidents as traffic incidents for a few reasons. One of these reasons is that, unlike the word accident itself, incident does not imply anything about the intention or lack of intention behind the event that has occurred. This neutrality is obviously important for news reports alerting drivers to potential traffic delays, since the cause of a crash is often not immediately obvious, and certainly may not be immediately released to news organizations. “Traffic” is also a useful word in many of these contexts; traffic incident potentially covers roadway events involving pedestrians in a way that is less apparent when the focus is on vehicles, and prefacing incident with traffic also generally suggests that the incident in question is related to transit in some way (a tree falling on a car parked in an individual’s home driveway could potentially be a “vehicle incident,” but it would not be a “traffic” incident).
All of these implications help to specify the parameters of the event that has occurred, without adopting or implying any presumptions as to how or why. Even though a police report following a traffic incident may assign fault by determining that the accident was precipitated by one driver breaking the law (for instance, by running a stop sign), law enforcement professionals, attorneys, and even in many cases auto insurance representatives are typically careful with the language they use to refer to a situation involving one or more vehicles that results in physical injuries or property damage.
How Much Compensation Do You Get From a Car Crash?
Every situation is unique, so the details of your individual case may be worth discussing with a Missouri personal injury lawyer. One of the major advantages of working with a car accident lawyer in the Kansas City area is that legal professionals who handle this type of case regularly are often in a position to provide informed preliminary estimates of the likely economic and non-economic damages that may be recoverable, based on the factors present in a particular case. For most claims arising from vehicle accidents, the combination of these two types of damages will represent the total compensation sought in the case.
Understanding Types of Damages From Vehicle Accidents
“Damages” is the term legal professionals use for the harms or losses for which the plaintiff in a personal injury case is seeking compensation. Somewhat confusingly, the same word also refers to the sums a court may order a defendant to pay if the plaintiff wins their case. Given this dual meaning, you may find it helpful to think of damages as the composite value of a claim. This total is “composite” because it includes the two main types of damages: economic and non-economic.
Economic Damages
The economic damages from vehicle accidents generally include expenses like medical bills and the costs of vehicle repairs. Often, these economic damages also include financial losses such as the wages an accident victim would have been expected to earn during a time period when he or she misses work due to the accident. Depending on the severity of the accident, that missed work could be one day or many months. The amount needed to compensate an individual for those missed wages will depend partly on their regular rate of pay.
The expenses for vehicle repairs and medical treatments needed after an accident can be similarly variable. These expenses often become areas in which an at-fault driver’s insurance provider will try to argue that the expenses are less than the accident victim claims, or that not all of the expenses are directly related to the accident. Collecting documentation to substantiate an accident victim’s estimates of his or her economic damages and organizing that information effectively to present a clear and persuasive argument for the estimated total often forms an important part of a car accident lawyer’s work in helping clients to maximize their compensation from vehicle accidents.
Non-Economic Damages
While the validity of an accident victim’s calculations for economic damages may sometimes be contested by the other party’s insurance company, non-economic damages can be more difficult to prove. With economic damages, usually there are forms of “hard” documentation, such as repair estimates, receipts, and medical bills, available to back up an accident victim’s claims regarding the total amounts. Most often, the challenge in those cases is to clearly demonstrate that the costs were incurred as a direct result of the accident and its effects on personal health and property. As the Legal Information Institute (LII) from Cornell Law School implies, non-economic damages cover important but hard-to-document effects of vehicle accidents that negatively impact an individual’s quality of life. Probably “pain and suffering” forms one of the most widely recognized examples, but “emotional distress” (often as a result of car accident trauma) and “loss of enjoyment” (for example, of activities an individual customarily took pleasure in before the accident but is no longer able to participate in or no longer finds pleasurable thanks to the lingering effects of the incident).
Like economic damages, the value of claims for non-economic damages can cover quite a range. However, the total amount of compensation for non-economic damages to which individuals injured in vehicle accidents may be entitled is more likely than that associated with economic damages to be based on expectations of ongoing harms. While some types of physical injuries from vehicle accidents may result in long-term medical expenses or permanent disabilities that represent ongoing financial losses in the form of reduced earning power, it is also very common for economic damages to include many “one-and-done” expenses whose compensatory value is tied to that initial loss. Non-economic damages frequently have to account for not only the severity, but also the anticipated longevity, of a traffic incident’s impact on those involved. Consulting with a car accident attorney from Dickerson Oxton may help victims of vehicle accidents in the Kansas City area prepare to effectively itemize their non-economic damages.
Missouri Law: Comparative Fault and the Computation of Compensatory Damages From Vehicle Accidents
Besides assisting in the calculation and itemization of economic and non-economic damages, a Missouri car accident lawyer may sometimes be able to help victims of vehicle accidents maximize their total compensation by assisting them in navigating Missouri liability law. Missouri is what is known as a “pure” comparative fault state, a fact that has significant implications for the way potential compensation is structured in personal injury cases. The essential framework is laid out in Mo. Rev. Stat. § 538.067, but individuals who are not accustomed to seeing the law applied in practice may be at something of a disadvantage when negotiating with auto insurance companies for a fair settlement.
What Is Missouri’s Law for Comparative Fault?
The “pure” comparative fault rule means that individuals injured in Missouri vehicle accidents can seek compensation for the portion of total damages attributable to the other party (or, in multi-vehicle accidents, any other party), even if an investigation of the accident determines that the injured individual bears more than half of the fault for the accident (and its damages). This rule is markedly different from the expectation in “modified” comparative fault states, where individuals are generally not eligible to recover compensation when they are determined to bear more than half of the fault (some states make the cutoff half of the share of fault; others place the distinction at 51%).
The Role of Comparative Fault in Determining Compensation
The comparative fault doctrine is applied in courts when judges or juries are assessing relative degrees of responsibility for an accident in order to determine not just whether an individual is entitled to compensation, but how much compensation they should be awarded. Thanks to this court-centric function, Kansas City residents injured in vehicle accidents may be surprised to learn that Missouri’s comparative fault law can sometimes impact total compensation even in a case that never leads to a single court appearance.
Why Comparative Fault May Affect Compensation in a Case That Never Goes to Court
The reason for this extended impact is that auto insurance providers are aware of Missouri’s pure comparative fault rule. Generally speaking, their insurance adjusters and legal staff will propose settlements that are intended to cost the company less than it would risk paying if it went to court over a claim and lost the case. Because the company can still end up paying a significant amount even if a judge or jury determines that the individual pursuing the claim was much more than 50% responsible for their own damages, an insurance company will often have a considerable incentive to negotiate a reasonable settlement.
On the other hand, the same balancing act can be important for accident victims: If a settlement offer is close to the maximum amount you would be expected to receive for a victory in court, then it may make sense to accept the settlement and avoid the trial. Car accident attorneys experienced in the intricacies of Missouri law often foreground these considerations in helping clients evaluate settlement offers.
Consult With a Kansas City Car Accident Lawyer Today
Individuals injured in vehicle accidents often face multiple obstacles in recovering fair compensation. The fact that getting any claim approved can frequently be an arduous, multi-step undertaking can sometimes obscure the fact that the total amount, not just the approval or denial of a claim, makes a significant difference in whether the payment truly achieves its legal goal of returning an injured party to their state before the incident that resulted in harm. The computation of damages will always depend on the specifics of the case, so schedule a consultation with one of our Kansas City car accident attorneys today to discuss the particulars of your situation. Call the Dickerson Oxton team at (816) 542-6599 to arrange a meeting.