 
People
who have a personal injury claim usually want to know what kind of back
injury settlement or other car accident insurance settlement amounts
they can expect to get. I have been doing these types of cases for over
14 years, and have settled or argued nearly one thousand personal injury
cases. I can tell you that there is no one amount you can get for a
certain type of case and that you can not use a simple formula to find
out how much your claim is worth.
How much the case is worth is most often determined when the insurance
company adjuster and the attorney try to predict what an imaginary
jury would award
the client. The attorney and the adjuster do this after all the evidence is in and
they have determined
what kind of witness the client might make in court. The two then come
to some agreement, with the permission of the client, as to what the
settlement amount will be. Without an attorney, the insurance
company will try to convince the accident victim that their claim isn't worth much
and will often give a "take it or leave it" offer. A personal
injury attorney knows from a lot of experience how much a case is worth.
The attorney also has negotiating skills and the threat of a lawsuit.
The lawyer has it in their interest to get the highest amount since they will
earn more if they get more for you. For example, we have had people
call us after settling a case with the insurance company on their own.
They got $500 for pain and suffering, a common initial lowball offer
by the insurance companies. Say, for example, I estimated that I would
have gotten a low total settlement of $5000 for pain and suffering for the
same claim. I would have gotten a third for fees or $1666 and about
$60 for costs, but the client would have gotten $3273 or $2773 more
than what they got handling the case themselves. Each case will vary, of course.
How much a client will receive for a back injury settlement
depends upon many factors such as the severity of the injury, how bad
the impact of the car crash was, the length of treatment
for the injury,
the amount of permanent tissue damage done, how much work was missed,
how much pay was lost, how it affected the lifestyle and the ability
to work of the individual, and what kind of job they had if it was permanently
lost due to the injuries. I have had back injury settlements for pain
and suffering between
the range of $900 to $115,000. Again these amounts are tied to the
above factors and their interplay.
Other factors such as who was at fault in the accident
can be important in determining the settlement amount sometimes. For example: a person
who was not wearing a seat
belt is considered partly negligent in some states even if they were
rear ended. The highest
injury settlement I have ever heard of was in England
for a woman who got fibromyalgia and won 1.25 million pounds, or roughly
3 million dollars in 1996. This is the world record, as far as I know,
and is a very unusual case.
Other kinds of settlements can be much larger, and I have had car accident insurance and
homeowners insurance injury settlements
overall that settled for much higher than the back injury
settlements mentioned above, including a number of wrongful
death cases. Other kinds of car accident insurance settlements depend
on the same factors that apply to back injury settlements, where there
is only soft tissue damage. These more serious accident settlements also depend on the amount of insurance available. Sometimes issues
such as how a person's appearance is affected, if there is scarring or
disfigurement, can affect the final pain and suffering settlement
or judgment received. These settlement amounts may also be reliant on whether or not future surgery
is recommended by the victim's doctor.
If you would like the highest car accident insurance
settlement or back injury settlement and you had an injury in OR or WA
state then contact Todd Peterson
now |
