If you bring a personal injury lawsuit, you might sue an individual or a business. You may also have a situation where you’re targeting an insurance company.
The person or business that you’re suing might have an insurance policy, and the company that issued that policy might offer you some cash as a settlement. However, they may not offer you the amount you want. If that happens, you may continue pursuing additional damages.
At that point, the insurance policy might claim you had a duty to mitigate damages, but you didn’t satisfy that requirement. Maybe they’re offering you less money because they say you didn’t fulfill the duty you had.
You should understand this concept, so we’ll discuss it right now. We’ll also talk about how it can change your life.
What is the Duty to Mitigate Damages?
Let’s say that a person or entity harmed you. Their insurance should cover your medical bills and possibly your pain and suffering as well. For instance, maybe another driver hit your car, and the accident broke your leg.
You saw a doctor, and they performed surgery. During your recovery, though, they told you that you should do physical therapy. They said that if you don’t do it, you could lose flexibility in that leg and have significant pain from that point forward.
You stopped doing the physical therapy, though. You did it a few times but then gave up because you didn’t like it.
If so, you failed to mitigate damages. Failure to mitigate damages could exacerbate your injury, and this example shows how. Since you didn’t do the physical therapy exercises like the doctor told you, you’re in much more pain now than what you’d experience if you had finished the treatment like the doctor said.
How Might This Change Your Life?
If you don’t mitigate damages in the situation we just described, you might have chronic leg pain for years after that. You might never fully recover. The doctor told you this could happen, but you felt like the physical therapy took too much effort. That’s why you quit.
Your life can completely change in any situation where you discarded a doctor’s advice and didn’t mitigate physical damages. An injury that you sustain might get worse and become debilitating if you didn’t follow a doctor’s advice.
You might have a hard time doing the physical therapy that a doctor prescribed, but you must do it. Otherwise, you could have a tough life following an accident where you sustained a broken bone or a similar injury.
Doctors don’t just give you advice for no reason. They know what kind of life you’ll lead if you don’t mitigate damages.
You Won’t Get the Money You Need
Not mitigating damages can harm you in another way, though. Let’s use that same example again.
Another driver hit your car. The other driver admitted they caused the accident. Perhaps they sped through a light and hit you in an intersection, or they changed lanes without signaling.
Whatever the circumstances, the other driver has insurance, but the company won’t give you the money you want. You want cash that will cover both your non-economic damages, like loss of joy in your life and pain and suffering, and also economic damages, like lost wages while you can’t work.
If you don’t follow the doctor’s advice and do the physical therapy, though, you won’t get both the economic and non-economic damages. You may only get the economic damages since the insurance company will still cover your lost wages or the money you require for car repairs.
They won’t give you the money you could get if you’d completed the physical therapy, though, because you made your pain and suffering worse through your inaction.
If you had finished the physical therapy, you wouldn’t have so much pain now, and you would have your full range of motion. Since you didn’t finish the PT, you can’t walk without wincing now. You’re in pain all the time, and you can’t do the work you once could.
Your Entire Life Can Change
At the time, in cases like this, it can seem like not mitigating damages might not matter so much. You might feel like you can take a doctor’s advice, but perhaps you think you know better. You may also not finish physical therapy or take similar actions because it’s hard, and you give up.
Your life might not look the same after you make this decision, and usually, you won’t like the changes. You may not have the money you need because the insurance company didn’t give you as much, and you also have physical limitations, perhaps severe ones.
If you think about other situations where you could mitigate damages, but you don’t do it, you can easily imagine scenarios where you’re likewise limited. These limitations might not come from a courtroom setting.
For example, maybe a doctor tells you that you must eat healthier foods and lose weight, or you won’t have a very good quality of life from that point on. You ignore that advice and keep overeating and eating unhealthy foods.
You might develop diabetes and deal with that going forward. You may have bad knees because you’re stressing the joints. You don’t like walking because it hurts your knees, but inactivity makes the situation worse.
You might feel like following a doctor’s advice isn’t easy in situations where you can mitigate damage, but if you don’t do it, you probably won’t like what your life becomes. You must work hard if you sustain physical damage because, if you don’t do that work, you might end up much worse within a few months or a couple of years.
Avoiding the duty that you have to mitigate damages can hurt you in court, and it can also harm you physically. Remember that. If you don’t mitigate damages while you can, your life might get a lot worse.
