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Calculating Personal Injury Compensation: How Much Is Your Personal Injury Case Worth?
Insurance adjusters will provide you with their calculations regarding the value of your personal injury claim. Can you trust that their valuation represents your losses? Often, the answer is no. Insurance companies often make initial offers that may not cover the full extent of your damages, so consulting with a California personal injury attorney may assist you in assessing your case.
Unfortunately, there is no fixed formula to determine the potential compensation for your claim. Fair compensation is often difficult to decide on, but many factors can help you understand how damages are typically calculated. Keep in mind that no two personal injury cases are exactly the same, and how much you receive depends on your medical expenses, lost income, and your pain and suffering. Read on to learn how injury claims are typically valued.
How Much Compensation Can I Pursue?
This is a common question for anyone considering a personal injury claim, whether it results from injuries in a car accident or a medical malpractice incident. Personal injury settlements vary widely based on the specific circumstances of each case, including the severity of injuries, medical expenses, and other factors. Studies suggest that approximately 95% of personal injury lawsuits end in a pre-trial settlement. Talk with our car accident lawyers to help you navigate the legal process and pursue compensation.
Your injury resulted in various types of losses, often referred to as damages by insurance companies. Damages fall into two categories, and most injured individuals will have some from each.
- Special Damages — These damages are also known as economic damages. They are easily calculable and represent the assets you lost due to the negligence of the defendant. Special damages include elements such as lost wages and medical expenses.
- General Damages — These are also called non-economic damages, and they represent the intangible losses you have suffered or will suffer in the future. They include pain and suffering, loss of society, loss of consortium, scarring and disfigurement, and mental anguish.
Assessing The Value Of Pain & Suffering Damages
Pain and suffering damages are not calculated with a single formula. One approach sometimes used is the “per diem” method, which assigns a daily value to the discomfort you experience and multiplies it by the estimated number of days your symptoms are expected to last. This is just one of several methods for estimating non-economic damages. Insurers and courts evaluate these damages differently and often rely on medical documentation, the severity of the injury, and how the injury affects your daily life.
Valuing Special Damages
Calculating special damages is usually straightforward. The monetary costs of your injury are added together. These economic damages may include items like:
- Past and future lost income.
- Medical expenses, including therapies and nursing care.
- Related out-of-pocket expenses such as medication, transportation to medical appointments, and medical devices.
- Costs for things you could not do while you were injured, like childcare, housekeeping, and yard work.
- Lost or damaged personal items, also known as property damage.
Medical expenses are a necessary element of a personal injury claim. Include the full amounts of your medical and prescription costs, even if your health insurance covered some or all of the bill. You should also ensure that you include all bills related to your services. For example, if you undergo imaging tests such as MRIs, CT scans, or X-rays, you will likely receive a bill from the hospital or facility, as well as for the radiologist who interpreted the test and provided the results. If you go to the emergency room, you will typically receive separate bills for the hospital and the physician who treated you.
Valuing General Damages
General damages are often more difficult to assign a value to, as they are subjective. There is no straightforward way to measure each claimant’s general damages monetarily, and every case is unique. Even if you sustained the same injury as someone else, your pain and suffering will differ. You could develop anxiety and depression, and the other person may not. Your injury could prevent you from working, while another person may still be able to do their job.
Often referred to simply as pain and suffering, general damages can include:
- Physical pain
- Emotional distress
- Anxiety and depression
- Loss of consortium
- Lack of concentration
- Sleep disturbances
One common method for estimating general damages is to consider the value of your special damages and apply a multiplier, although this approach can vary significantly depending on the specific case. If you have a mild to moderate injury, insurance companies use different methods to assess general damages, and approaches can vary between firms and cases.
If you sustained significant injuries, it is advisable to hire an experienced California personal injury attorney who will work to advocate for appropriate compensation for your pain and suffering with the insurance company.
Personal injury calculations for claims take into consideration:
- Mental & Emotional Damage — If your accident causes mental or emotional distress, you may qualify for compensation. The severity of the issue matters, and consulting a mental health professional can help support your claim. Document symptoms and treatment to prove the impact of your mental and emotional damage in your injury case.
- Permanent Injuries or Chronic Pain — General damages can be greater if you will have long-term pain, permanent physical injuries, scarring, amputations, disabilities, or paralysis.
- Shocking Events — If your injury is caused by a traumatic event such as a shooting, an aviation crash, or entrapment in a burning vehicle, your general damages may include these factors upon evaluation.
Assessing the value of your general damages can be challenging to do on your own, even if you know the pain and suffering you are going through. What makes these claims difficult is that you must prove your pain and suffering to the insurance company, convincing them to provide appropriate compensation for your documented damages.
Proving Your Desired Compensation
Once you know the potential value of your personal injury claim, the next step is for you or your California personal injury attorney to establish to the insurance company that:
- The person they insured owed you a duty of care or had an obligation not to harm you.
- That person breached their duty to you and was negligent in their actions.
- Their negligence directly caused your injuries.
- Your injuries caused your damages, for which the insured is liable.
Establishing these critical points involves providing photographs of your injuries or the accident, witness statements, medical records, supporting documentation, bills, and other relevant pieces of evidence. You or your attorney will send a demand for compensation along with copies of your medical records and other types of evidence.
The estimate of your claim is the sum of your special damages and your general damages. This sum would be used as your demand for compensation.
Personal Injury Calculators & Insurance Carriers
In many cases, the insurance adjuster may deny your first demand for compensation. It is the job of the adjuster to carefully examine your demand for compensation to determine how you calculated the amounts and if the evidence you provided supports your demand.
They will also evaluate whether the insured individual is entirely liable for the injuries you sustained. The evidence for your special damages will also be reviewed for legitimacy. For general damages, the adjuster will make an assessment as to how much they believe to be appropriate and compare it to the amount you are requesting.
Often, the value assessed by these adjusters may be lower than what you seek. In this case, you or your California personal injury attorney may negotiate for a fair settlement and convince the adjuster that the evidence you provided supports your calculations fully.
Settlement Calculators
Personal injury settlement calculators are available and used by many insurance companies to determine payouts. Colossus is one of the most common programs of this type. These programs are created specifically for insurance companies. They assign values to your special damages and other elements of your personal injury claim. Colossus and other applications of this type will utilize hundreds of factors in your claim, such as whether you are represented by a California personal injury lawyer and the average settlement amounts for similar injuries in your region.
California personal injury attorneys often challenge programs like Colossus and other applications and variables that the other party might use to affect the claimant’s compensation significantly. Even a simple clerical error in the system could reduce the value of your damages. These programs are unable to calculate the depth of your pain and suffering and don’t take into account the negative impact of your injuries on your life. Instead, they generalize how much you are owed based on statistics that cannot measure an individual’s pain and suffering.
Insurance Regulators Receive $10 Million From Allstate
In 2009, a multi-state investigation was launched by insurance commissioners regarding Allstate Insurance Company’s use of the Colossus program to value personal injury car accident cases. Insurance commissioners looked at how:
- Colossus is programmed.
- Adjusters are trained to use the program.
- Adjusters input information about claims.
- Colossus is “tuned” or updated to reflect current claim settlement values.
Although investigators did not find any company-wide problems with the underpayment of injury claims, they determined that there is a need for increased oversight and improved training for adjusters.
As a result, Allstate paid regulators $10 million and agreed to implement the investigator’s recommendations, which included informing claimants when Colossus is used to calculate the value of their claim.
Aspects Of Personal Injury Valuations
If your claim involves birth injuries, product liability, or medical malpractice, you are facing complex litigation against corporate entities. This requires the representation of a skilled California personal injury attorney. People with other personal injury claims involving negligence, such as car accidents, dog bites, or slip and fall accidents, also significantly benefit from the representation of an experienced attorney to deal with the insurance company and pursue fair compensation for damages.
Factors that can significantly impact the insurance company’s calculations for personal injury settlements include:
- Policy Limits — If the limits of the insured’s policy are less than your damages, you will need to file a lawsuit against the negligent person for the difference.
- Shared Fault — It is almost likely and expected that the insurance adjuster will attempt to place some of the blame for your accident on you. In some states, they can deny your claim based on any negligence of yours that they believe contributed to your injuries.
- Inconsistent Medical Expenses — The insurance company will only cover medical expenses that it deems reasonable and necessary. If a personal injury medical provider inflates your medical bills with excessive tests and treatments, the adjuster can refuse to calculate your damages with them.
How Experienced California Personal Injury Attorneys Can Help
Insurance companies prefer that you reach a settlement with the assigned adjuster in your claim without the use of a California personal injury attorney. They understand that having legal representation can be crucial for protecting the victims’ interests, and lawyers work to evaluate and present evidence on their clients’ behalf. For this reason, having an experienced personal injury attorney can be crucial for protecting your interests.
If your claim winds up in a trial, there may be a possibility that a jury will determine the value of your damages to be higher than the settlement offer. However, it is also risky for injured individuals to go to trial, as the jury might determine that the victims are owed far less or even nothing. An experienced California personal injury attorney can negotiate a fair settlement on your behalf.
Consult our attorneys at Arash Law by phone at (888) 488-1391 or by completing our “Do I Have A Case?” form here to schedule a free initial consultation.
The Personal Injury Pre-Litigation Process
03. Investigating & Evaluating — We will investigate all issues regarding insurance coverage and evaluate all applicable insurance policies and their benefits to help you pursue appropriate compensation.
Please note that this timeline only outlines the general pre-litigation process and may vary for each case. Your claim may also have unique circumstances, potentially resulting in a different outcome from what is shown in the general timeline. Consult our personal injury lawyers for a free case review.
