From the combination of provisions 928 and 298 of the Civil Code, it follows that a person who has suffered bodily injury or damage to their health as a result of a traffic accident is entitled to claim future consequential damages (=lost profits), since, due to their inability or reduced ability to work as a result of bodily injury or damage to their health, they lose the income from their work, which, had they been fully able, they would normally have earned in the future.
It is not necessary to be certain that such income would have been earned; it is sufficient that there is a probability, since the facts will be assessed by the judge in each case. The person injured in the traffic accident must set out in their lawsuit the specific facts that make their future damage probable and enable the judge to assess the likelihood of the damage occurring. If this is the case, then the lawsuit is valid and lawful, but if the statement of facts presents the future damage as merely contingent, then the lawsuit is not lawful and no claim for compensation arises.
If, for example, the injured person was working in a job with a fixed salary before the accident and after the accident is unable to work for health reasons for a period of three months, those three months’ wages are definitely lost earnings. Conversely, if the plaintiff’s damage appears in the lawsuit as probable in the normal course of events, but the evidence shows that it is merely contingent, it will be rejected on substantive grounds.
Another important issue is that in order for compensation to be awarded for future damage, it must be possible to quantify it at the time of the court decision, either as a lump sum (a single amount to be paid once) or in installments (as separate, distinct amounts to be paid at regular intervals, for example, every month).
One case of future deprivation—lost earnings—due to bodily injury or damage to health, which entails compensable property damage for the victim, is that in which, due to such injury, the victim’s ability to work and earn an income is affected, reduced, or eliminated. the victim’s ability to work and earn an income. The first factor to be taken into account is the ability to perform the job that the victim used to do before the harmful event occurred. For example, a leg injury does not affect the ability to work and therefore the ability to earn an income in the same way for a farmer and an office worker. It is clear that each case must be examined specifically on the basis of individual circumstances and particularities, since the same injury does not affect the ability to work in the same way in all cases, just as a reduction in the ability to work does not always cause the same financial loss to the victim, or may even not entail any financial loss for the victim. The latter is evident in cases where the victim is unemployed or was not working before suffering bodily injury or damage to their health for other reasons, whether objective or subjective (due to their young age).
On the other hand, in order to calculate the compensation, it is necessary to predict what the injured party will be deprived of in the future, since a person who was not working until the day of the accident cannot prove that, based on his professional skills and the state of the labor market at that particular time, he would be able to secure a job in the near future if the traffic accident had not occurred.
Finally, for Article 929 of the Civil Code to apply, it is sufficient that the injured party has a real possibility of earning income from work. In any case, the future loss of income that the injured non-working person claims to be compensated for up to the day of the accident must be foreseeable, both in terms of its existence and its extent, and must not depend on future unforeseeable factors, such as the injured person’s ability to work in the future.
Therefore, in order to prove the likelihood of future damage, the injured party must base their claim on the profession they exercised prior to the damaging event and on the income they would have received from it, that is, to claim that, according to the normal course of events, if the accident had not occurred, they would have continued to practice the same profession, receiving the same income.
