My knees used to hurt every day. Sometimes they hurt for almost the entire day. It’s wear and tear; 52 years of just plain old ordinary use, on top of decades of running, bike-riding and jumping rope in order to fight for something that feels like fitness.
So, I started taking glucosamine and a couple of other supplements that are supposed to help my body’s tendons, joints and cartilage. In other words, they’re supposed to reduce pain and increase comfort.
The supplements are expensive but they’ve helped. And this made me start thinking about how much money I would spend, if money could be used in this way, in order to eliminate physical pain and discomfort from my life completely.
What if money could restore me to a benchmark level of comfort and performance?
A couple of weeks ago, The Washington Post published an article about how much money people might be willing to spend in order to be pain free. At the risk of oversimplification, according to the study cited by the article, people would pay between $56.00 and $145.00 per day in order to be pain free. That works out to between $20,000.00 and $53,000.00 per year.
This question, (how much money is a pain-free day worth), is one that lawyers, judges and courts have awkwardly been struggling to answer for generations. For lawyers who represent people who have been seriously and sometimes grievously injured as a result of another person or company’s intentional or negligent conduct, the dollar value of pain is crucially important.
It requires a lawyer to authentically place himself into the life, the skin, the body of the person who so desperately requires his advocacy.
Our court system simply has no other way to compensate people for their pain, than asking a jury to be fair just and reasonable and decide how much money to award someone who has been injured by someone else’s wrongful conduct.
As an advocate for a seriously injured person, a lawyer absolutely must be able to draw from a natural, profoundly deep well of compassion. If you’re a lawyer and you’re advocating for someone who suffers with pain, anguish, worry and fear, and you don’t have that well of compassion, then you’re just faking it. If you can’t identify with that person’s experience, then try another line of work.
All of us at the Maddox Law Firm learn intimately about the people who seek our representation. It is part of our mission to become experts in our people, their experience, their losses, obstacles, handicaps, their pain and their goals. That’s what the fight is about.
You can’t fight for a file. There’s no inspiration in a case number. We fight for people and their families and the best possible results that can be obtained for them.