How Much Is My Personal Injury Case Worth?
Every case has a different value. Every case is unique. Every case has different facts. You could have a disputed liability situation where the insurance company is saying, “Our insured or defendant driver is not liable for any of your injuries or any of your damages”. You could have a personal injury case where the insurance company has completely admitted liability. You can have a case where you have soft tissue injuries that last for three, six, nine weeks. And then all of a sudden you feel better after some physical therapy. Or you could have a case where you are catastrophically injured, and you suffer serious injuries that will significantly affect the quality of your life for the rest of your life.
Types of Cases
These two types of cases are very different and they should be viewed on a spectrum. You may have minimal injuries here, or you may have severe injuries over there. And if you have a case, you are likely somewhere in the middle. The question here is where your case falls on that spectrum. If you imagine a situation where you have a pebble in your shoe, and you can still keep walking or keep going wherever you are going, and then you stop and you take the pebble out of your shoe and now all is well. How much does that worth? $10,000, $15,000? On the other end of the spectrum, let us say that you are paralyzed from the neck down. What is that worth? A million dollars, $5 million? Those are all questions that a jury has to answer.
The Value of the Case
When we are asked what is the value of my case, we think of the case somewhere within that spectrum. Where does this case fall on that spectrum or where does a jury see this case on that spectrum. The only way that you can answer that question is to have some degree of familiarity with what juries in our area are doing. If you don’t practice law in Central Virginia, then you will have no idea how juries in our area are awarding judgments based on certain types of injuries.
We look at your case as a whole. How has this case affected your life, is it a pebble in your shoe or are you paralyzed from the neck down, or where are you in the middle of that. It is sometimes very difficult to put a dollar number on the degree of your injury, but we do it by looking at what were your injuries, what effect have those injuries had on your life and on the quality of your life? What type of medical treatment have you had? What type of medical treatment will you need in the future? How long will it last and overall, how has this affected your life? And once we try to quantify all of that, we try to put a fair dollar number on your case, based on our experiences with juries in the Central Virginia area.
