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Kay v. Menard6/27/2000
do so when instructing the jury. The plaintiff's counsel, in arguing to the jury, did discuss the plaintiff's damages and did discuss methods of calculation for those damages. He then suggested approximate amounts that it could award from those calculations. However, he failed to mention anything about discounting any of the plaintiff's damages to their present day value. Defense counsel, we note, failed to move for judgment as a matter of law on the ground that no evidence of present-day value had been presented to the jury, and offered no objection to the plaintiff's argument concerning damages at the time that it was made.
It was only after final arguments had been concluded, and after the court's instruction had been given to the jury, that defense counsel first requested the trial justice to re-instruct the jury to discount the damages for future loss of earnings to their present-day value. The trial justice was unable to do so because there had been no evidence presented to the jury about such present-day value calculation. Consequently, the defendant's belated request for an instruction was ineffective and, if given, would have appeared to be a repudiation by the trial justice of plaintiff's counsel's closing argument, and certainly would have been prejudicial to the plaintiff. We conclude, therefore, that because of defense counsel's failure to move for judgment as a matter of law or to make timely objection, the trial justice did not err in refusing to re-instruct the jury to discount the plaintiff's damage award for future loss of earnings to its present-day value. We note for the trial bar, however, that in view of the complexity of these calculations, we believe that a trial jury ordinarily is incapable of making such a determination without the assistance of expert testimony. Consequently, in the future, we will expect the party seeking those damages to present specific evidence of their present-day value to the jury.
7. Future Medical Expenses
The defendant next asserts that the jury should not have been permitted to calculate the plaintiff's future medical expenses because of the inadequate evidence presented by the plaintiff on this issue. He contends that the plaintiff's medical expert gave a vague estimate of the cost of future medical expenses; consequently, any such jury award necessarily was speculative.
"This Court has never determined that entitlement to damages for future medical expenses arising from injuries incurred as a result of the negligence of another is dependent upon a calculation made with mathematical precision." Shepardson v. Consolidated Medical Equipment, Inc., 714 A.2d 1181, 1184 (R.I. 1998) (per curiam). "Damages that are foreseeable are recoverable in negligence actions * * *." Id.
The record indicates that the plaintiff's medical expert also was his surgeon. He testified that at the time of trial, the plaintiff already had been scheduled for a future surgical procedure to be performed on his injured ankle. He stated that his standard fee for such a procedure is in the range of $3,000. This assertion was supported by similar bills for the same surgical procedure performed by the surgeon on the plaintiff in the past. We also note that defense counsel failed to request an itemization by the jury of any award it might make in favor of the plaintiff and, because of the general verdict, we are unable to review the propriety of the award, if any, that might have been made by the jury for future medical expenses.
In view of the fact that the plaintiff's future medical expenses were foreseeable, and the medical expert's estimation of the cost of the planned surgery was reasonable, the trial justice did nor er
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