What Is “Loss Of Consortium” In A Personal Injury Claim?

Transcript

Hi, I’m Mike Hancock with Hancock Injury Attorneys and today I’m going to answer a question that frequently arises during my representation of my clients: what is a loss of consortium claim?

A loss of consortium claim is recognized in Florida. What a loss of consortium claim really means is that when one spouse has been injured from an accident, the law recognizes that the other spouse is most likely going to be impacted by the other spouse’s injuries.

One extreme example would be if a husband was involved in some type of accident where he was rendered a quadriplegic. Everybody can understand how that would affect the marital relations of the couple. And how the wife’s life in the marriage would be affected by the husband’s significant injury. The wife would have to change the way she runs the household, she would become the caregiver of the husband, and she would be impacted in many different ways.

So, the loss of consortium usually takes two different aspects: what the one spouse now has to do in the household in addition to what they did before; and the other aspect is how it affects the marital relations. And that really is the sexual relations and the intimacy that you once had in your marriage that might be affected by one spouse’s injury.

The value or evaluation of a loss of consortium claim takes into account many different factors. Generally speaking, the more severely injured the one spouse is the higher the evaluation of the other spouse’s loss of consortium claim would be.

This is Mike Hancock if you have any additional questions, please feel free to give me a call at the office at 813-915-1110.