Structured Settlement Awards
Structured settlements are designed to cover long-term costs or to provide extended benefits to the injured party over time. As such and by their nature, structured settlements are therefore typically spread out over many years or a lifetime.
The issues at hand in any structured settlement are the costs of any medical or home care that are necessary and general costs of living and family needs. Depending upon the nature of the injury, it could also include costs of special equipment such as wheelchairs or equipping a vehicle with special driving equipment.
The Structured Settlement Broker
In such cases, neither party has the ability to determine what kinds of costs will be incurred. Being able to forecast such costs not only means having an extensive knowledge of medical costs, but being able to accurately predict costs based on prognosis and increased costs of living over the term of the structured settlement. It is for this reason that one or both side will typically bring in an expert structured settlement broker who does the calculations and projections.
The figures that the structured settlement broker comes up with however, are just guesses. Nobody knows for sure what the costs of home care, medical treatment or devices, and other services will be in ten years let alone twenty. Neither can any structured settlement broker know what the costs are for drugs and/or treatments that have not yet been invented or know for certain whether the victim may develop future medical complications.
Nevertheless, structured settlement brokers and the parties can then end up with some hard figures to begin negotiations. These discussions can happen before, during, or after a trial. They can be informal and spend much time talking about fairness, or they can be quite technical and require a great deal of information from varied sources.
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