Pain and Suffering Documentation – the Pain Journal

The big variable in valuing most injury claims is your pain and suffering award.  How much should you get for pain and suffering?

The reality is that in North Carolina personal injury claims there is no precise formula espoused by law or insurance companies to define how much money you should get for pain and suffering related to your injury.  It is totally up to a jury.  There is the old “three times the medical bills” rule which is completely and utterly arbitrary and obsolete and is not to be mentioned in my presence.  You can also ask for a per diem jury instruction where you might request a certain amount per day of suffering, but that still doesn’t tell you how much.

There is no exact way to value personal injury, but there is one thing you can do for your claim to document your pain and suffering and therefore help to better illustrate and maybe more accurately value your pain and suffering award, and that is to keep a pain journal.

For your pain journal, I would suggest you write an entry every day, starting with the day of the accident moving forward, and write about three things each day: what hurts, how badly it hurts, and how it affects your daily activities.  This helps to flesh out your pain and suffering argument so that an adjuster, and maybe a jury, will better understand how this accident and its associated injuries affected you.  How long do you do this?  You do this until you have nothing further to write about.

So keep that pain journal up to date and call me if you have an accident claim. 919-929-2992