If you are seriously injured in the City of Buffalo and receive Social Security Disability or other financial compensation as a result, it may impact the amount that you receive if you sue the party responsible for your injury and win at trial.
Under New York State law, if you sue and recover money to cover the cost of your medical care, loss of earnings or other economic loss, the other party may then submit evidence to the judge in an attempt to establish that these expenses are covered, in whole or in part, by some other source of funding. This applies to both past and future expenses.
If the judge concludes with reasonable certainty that these expenses are covered by another source, he or she is required to then reduce the amount of monetary damages by the amount already covered. The purpose of this is to ensure that the injured person does not “double-dip” into multiple sources of compensation. Some sources of compensation, such as life insurance, are excluded from this rule.
While past compensation is usually easy to prove, continued compensation into the future, and how much will be received, may be difficult to prove. If the judge does not have a reasonable certainty that other sources of compensation will continue into the future, he or she is not required to reduce the amount of monetary damages beyond what the defense has proven to the judge’s satisfaction.
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