Wrongful Death Lawyer

In a wrongful death claim, the decedent value of life to surviving family members is often measured by their earning potential as well as a combination of other factors. But setting a price on human life is not a pleasant task, but it has to be done, and courts and juries are required to do this. 

But what happens when the death of a child or the death of an elderly person is the wrongful death claim you are filing? How do you measure the future financial contribution of an elderly retired person and how do you measure the contributions that a child might have when they have not decided anything about their life?

For the courts to assess the lost financial value of a death, they have certain guiding principles that they follow and we are going to talk about that now.

The Loss of a Child

When you lose an adult in your life, the financial value is easy to assess because you can simply look at their earning potential for the month, and calculate how much they would’ve learned should they have survived and had that job the rest of their life. Furthermore, when you are looking at the earning potential of an adult, you are also looking at the potential child rearing services, love and nurture and companionship that an adult relationship requires. Like if a father dies in an accident and his child may look for the loss of his father’s income and the loss of the father’s care and guidance in compensation.

When a child dies, the parents recovery is going to be limited solely to their financial loss which is quite small because of the death of a child the financial losses are determined by their age, sex, life expectancy, their work expects if they could work later in life, state of health and the habits of the child. From there, they also had the child’s earning potential, the relationship of the decedent to those who are claiming the loss and the health, age and circumstances of those who were claiming losses of this child’s life.

This means that a lot of what they are speculating is going to be just that: speculation. The younger the child is, the harder it is going to become to accurately get a good speculation for compensation return. So it is very easy to speculate the earning potential of an 18-year-old then it would be to speculate the earning potential of a five-year-old.

The Loss of an Elder

The death of a child will not produce a larger word, and the death of an elderly person is also going to have a limited recovery. This is because anyone who is past the age of retirement rarely has a significant earning potential, and often when you lose an elderly person you are dealing with fully grown adults who have lives of their own and do not require guidance, support or nurturing from their parents.

If you have lost somebody who is under the age of 18, or you have lost somebody who is over the age of retirement, you should speak to a wrongful death lawyer about your loss and see what they can do about your case.