How Personal Injury Damages Are Calculated

In this article, you will learn:

• Why different levels of injury warrant different calculations of damages

I don’t think there is a specific calculation for an amount. In smaller cases, if you’ve got $5,000 in bills, you might assume your case is worth 8 to $12,000, which is a little bit more and less than twice your bills. Still, it really goes by the facts of your case.

The bigger cases are a far, far different story. What’s the bigger case? Multiple providers, hospital or urgent care, chiropractor, physical therapy, orthopedic surgeon, pain management, back to an ortho, back to maybe physical therapy, with treatment stretching into years. When you get to a case like that, of which I’ve had many and still have many, these are the people that really need some help both with the physical part of things and the legal part of things, it’s a far different story. There is no calculation. In a case like I just described, there is more times than not a permanent injury. We know that because I will ask one of your treating doctors. Sometimes, doctors that are treating my clients don’t find a permanent injury, but my client still displays pain and suffering, in which case we will get a second opinion.

So, the amount of your bills becomes fairly irrelevant at this point to an extent. Let’s say for example that you are going up against an at-fault driver and that driver has a policy of $250,000 which a few of my cases do right now. If your medical bills total 8,000, or 10,000, or 15,000, it doesn’t really matter because if you have one doctor or more for you saying “Yes, plaintiff has, in my opinion, a permanent injury”, your case value now is much higher than what it would have been if there is no permanent injury found. Is there a calculation at this point? Not really. Your case could be worth $50,000, and this is assuming liability is established

I’ve never lost a bigger case at trial, only smaller ones that truly are he-said she-said lane changes that there’s not much at stake. There was not much of an offer being made, so we tried it and we lost, which is terrible, but it is what it is, and it happens very rarely. There’s not really a calculation for a permanent injury case. It will be a matter of what you can convince the jury to believe in terms of how your life has been impacted.

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