What kinds of damages are recoverable in a Florida wrongful death claim?
Essentially, there are two type of damages in a wrongful death claim. We refer to them as tangible damages, and those are easy to determine. That would be if the person is a wage earner, what their net accumulations were, or if that person had also big medical bills, like many times a person not seriously injured in an automobile accident is life flighted to a hospital. That’s very expensive. So you have lost wages. You have medical bills that are incurred.
Then we have damages that we call intangible or human damages. That’s based on the relationship of the person to the person that died. Essentially, they are this: if you a child, it’s the loss of guidance from your parent and what they would have done for you to help raise you as a child. If you are a spouse and you’re married, it’s the loss of companionship and the relationship that you had with that person. There’s no exact standard on those damages. The law is that they should be fair and just based on the evidence.