Building a personal injury lawsuit is no small feat. While it certainly takes knowledge of the law and an understanding of how to build compelling legal arguments, you also have to find a way to navigate the legal intricacies of your case at a time when you’re just struggling to get by on an emotional, physical, and financial level.
But as you move forward with building your case, you might find yourself at ease if you’re able to build a strong legal strategy that positions you for success. But how do you do that? There are a lot of steps that you can take, but perhaps one of the most important is ensuring that you have persuasive experts in your corner.
What experts do you need in your personal injury case?
The number and type of experts that you need in your case will depend on the facts at hand and the challenged portions of your case. However, here are some of the most commonly utilized experts in these kinds of cases:
- Accident reconstruction expert: This individual is well-versed in physics, and as such can apply scientific principles to the facts of your accident to better determine causation. This expert will analyze tire marks, vehicle resting positions, witness statements, and vehicle damage to reach their conclusion, which is then commemorated in a written report. This expert’s opinion can go a long way toward establishing liability and hopefully minimizing the risk that you’ll be found contributorily negligent.
- Medical expert: Even if you prove liability and causation, you’re still going to have to prove your damages. While it may be simple enough to show how much you’ve spent on your medical care up to now, you’ll also want to try to recoup compensation for your anticipated medical expenses and rehabilitation costs. This is where a medical expert may be able to help.
This expert can testify as to your prognosis and the kind of medical care that you’ll need going forward, as well as how much that care will cost. The portion of this expert’s testimony that speaks to the physical and emotional impact of your condition can also help you prove your non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life.
- Employment expert: You also have to be forward looking when you try to prove your lost wages and lost earnings capacity. But it can be hard to determine how much you would’ve made a decade from now if you hadn’t been injured, or what your career trajectory would’ve looked like if you had been able to work as normal far into the future.
An expert in your field of employment may be able to speak to these aspects, though. They can give a sense of what your income would’ve looked like if you had remained employed at your job and what your career path may have looked like if you were able to stick with it. This testimony can help support your damages pertaining to lost wages, as it’s often persuasive and hard for the defense to contradict.
Gathering the building block necessary for your case
There are a lot of pieces to a successful personal injury case. Expert witnesses are just part of the bigger picture that is your claim. But getting your hands around everything that you need to do in the legal arena can be enormously stressful given everything that you’re dealing with. That’s why now may be the best time for you to reach out to a legal professional who can help you put in the work necessary to build an appropriately aggressive legal strategy. Hopefully then you can achieve the outcome that you need and deserve.
