Wrongful Death and survivorship

When you lose someone close to you, the last thing you want to think about is what the law does and does not provide for. However, if your loved one’s death was caused by an injury which would have justified a lawsuit, you may be owed substantial money for their loss. Most states, including Pennsylvania, separate claims that resulted in death into two types: Wrongful Death and Survivorship. You can pursue either or both, depending on what happened and how you are related to the person you lost.

Wrongful Death is meant to compensate the direct family members of the deceased for the loss of that person. In Pennsylvania, this kind of case can only be pursued by the legal spouse, parents, or children of the deceased. For a Wrongful Death case, the court is looking to compensate you for the loss of your loved one’s financial support and the loss of their emotional support and affection. What they went through before they died or what you went through taking care of them is not part of this kind of award. Importantly, the costs of medical care that your loved one needed before they passed are also not part of this kind of case. These cases focus heavily on the quality of the relationship between you and your loved one.

Survivorship is meant to compensate the estate of the deceased for all of the things that a normal personal injury lawsuit would include: medical costs, lost wages or earning potential, pain and suffering. Everything that Wrongful Death leaves out about how the injury affected their life before it killed them goes here. A survivorship claim is made on behalf of the estate, the legal entity that owns all your loved one’s stuff, money, and debts between their passing and the distribution of their will. Because of that, the proper plaintiff for a Survivorship claim is generally the administrator of their estate. If no administrator has been appointed, an experienced personal injury attorney can often aide you in appointing the most appropriate family member to this role.

The law can be cold and unfeeling when the loss of a loved one leaves a hole in your life. My job is to tackle those brutal realities so that you don’t have to, and to force the person or business whose actions or inaction took your loved one away to compensate you for that loss.