In a Boat Accident? Don’t Make These Mistakes

If you’re kayaking on a waterway, you can also get compensation for injuries. There are many times that other boats on the waterway don’t see kayakers, or they’re going too fast and they’re careless, and they hit a kayak. If they do, it could be a catastrophic injury because of the nature of the big boat versus the little kayak and things of that nature. It’s really important to get your investigation started early to determine whether or not somebody did do something wrong, and try to get responsibility away from the kayaker. Of course they’re going to try to blame it on the kayaker being in the wrong place or something like that, so it’s important to get witness statements. There could be five or six witnesses on a boat. You want to make sure you get witness statements from all of those people to make sure that you got the full picture, and to make sure that we’re putting the right responsibility on the offending boat and get it away from you.

The damages you can recover from a boating accident injury are no different than the damages you can recover in any type of accident case. The one expense that you can get recovered for is medical expenses. When I say medical expenses, we’re talking about medical care that you’ve had in the past and into the future relating to the accident. If you need future care, we can hire experts to determine what that future care would be and put a value on that.

We also have damages related to your ability to do what you normally do around your house; they’re called household service losses. If you now need someone to plow your driveway or mow your lawn, or things of that nature, there is a value to that that you can recover. There are also your lost wage expenses. Those can be substantial at time, especially if you’re seriously injured and you can’t go back to work right away or you can’t go back at all. We would hire experts to do projections and sometimes these lost wage claims can be in the millions of dollars. Last, but not least, you have your pain and suffering damages, which may be the most significant damage that you have. You have what’s called past pain and suffering damages and future pain and suffering damages. The future damages are sometimes affected by your age. If you have a 20-year-old person with a really severe injury and their life expectancy is another 60 years, that’s a lot more significant than someone with, say, a 10-year life expectancy because they’re later in their years, so age could be a factor in determining those future pain and suffering damages. The big thing is to make sure that you get the proper experts involved, to make sure that you get the full compensation you deserve.