What Is the Average Settlement Amount for a Personal Injury Case?

If you’re bringing a claim after an accident caused by someone else’s negligence, working with a Salt Lake City, UT personal injury lawyer is the best way to get the largest settlement possible for your personal injury case.

What Is the Average Settlement Amount for a Personal Injury Case?

Nationally speaking, the average for personal injury is right about $55,000. But it’s important to realize that an average is just the middle number between the lowest and the highest extremes. Many personal injury claims settle for just a couple hundred dollars. A few very high claims run to more than $10 million (and these are the ones that make the news). The worth of your case is not determined by the averages but by the specific details of your claim.

What Makes a Claim More or Less Valuable?

The Nature of Your Injuries

The number one determiner of the value of your claim is your injuries. The more catastrophic these are, the more you will need to seek in compensation. Minor injuries like sprains, contusions, fractures, and small puncture wounds will always have lower medical bills than more extensive injuries that require multiple surgeries and lots of physical therapy and missed time from work.

The highest value claims are usually those in which someone was injured so badly as to suffer a permanent disability. In these claims, the injuries suffered are typically paralysis, severe traumatic brain injury, and similar life-changing injuries. Your injuries affect the overall worth of your claim in three important ways:

Expense

First, there is simply the expense of the medical treatment itself. As we all know, medical bills in 21st-century America are sky-high, and it’s very easy to run into the tens of thousands of dollars with just a day or two in the hospital. If you spend multiple weeks in the hospital and have several surgeries, you could easily have a medical bill of up to $1 million.

Income Loss

Second, your injuries affect your claim by affecting your job. Your claim should seek reimbursement for all the lost wages or salary from days that you couldn’t work. You also deserve to be reimbursed for the loss of vacation days or personal days, loss of progress towards acquiring a bonus you may have been working towards, and more. The worse your injuries are, the longer it’s likely you’ll be away from work. In a worst-case scenario, you may never be able to go back to work at all.

Non-Economic Damages

Finally, your injuries impact the worth of your claim because your non-economic damages (often known as pain and suffering or mental anguish) are calculated by multiplying a number between one and five by the total number of your economic damages. The higher your economic damages, the higher your non-economic damages are likely to be; and the worse your injuries are, the more likely it is that you will multiply your economic damages by a higher number, like four or five.

The Experience of Your Salt Lake City, UT Lawyer

Another very important factor in the worth of your claim will be the skill and experience of your lawyer. Your lawyer does a lot more than just file some paperwork with the court. Your lawyer can do an investigation to dig into what happened in the accident and turn up all the evidence needed to definitively prove fault and maximize your claim. An experienced lawyer also knows how to calculate all your damages properly, so you don’t miss out on anything. You might not think to include the cost of hiring someone to do yard work for a few months because you’re not able to mow your lawn, for example, but your lawyer will ask about things like these and make sure that everything gets included.

It also matters how skilled your lawyer is at negotiating. Most of these claims are settled through negotiations rather than in court, but when you start a negotiation with an insurance company, you’re on a rough road. Insurance companies have lots of experience and are highly motivated to minimize the claims of victims to protect their own bottom line. They also have powerful lawyers who know how to negotiate. If you’ve never done anything like this before, you are at a serious disadvantage. A lawyer keeps the playing field level and keeps pressure on the insurance company to treat you fairly.

Your lawyer will also protect you from signing any settlement agreement that isn’t in your best interests. An insurance company will frequently make an initial lowball offer, hoping that you will just sign without really understanding that this settlement won’t cover your full damages and that you can’t recover anything more once you sign on the dotted line. And finally, should you have to take your case to court, your lawyer’s courtroom experience will be essential. Ideally, you want a lawyer who has lots of experience in personal injury claims and who has seen success at the negotiating table as well as in the courtroom.

How Much Pain and Suffering You’ve Experienced

Another key factor in the total value of your claim will be the amount of emotional trauma you’ve suffered because of this experience. This varies from person to person, and the severity of injuries does not necessarily reflect the emotional suffering that a person goes through.

An extremely frightening and highly traumatic accident could have relatively minor injuries in the end. Conversely, a person can suffer grave injuries but have it all happen so quickly that they don’t really come away with a strong perception of having endured serious trauma. Your lawyer can help you to figure out what’s right to ask for here, and since this is a subjective category, it’s important that you be able to show as much evidence as possible of what you’ve suffered.

Some of the valuable evidence that your lawyer may help you gather might include testimony from friends, coworkers, or family members about how they’ve seen your quality of life decline since the accident. It can also be helpful if you’ve kept a journal during this time, talking through how you feel each day, the amount of pain you’re enduring, and how it’s interfering with your life. If you’ve had to seek therapy or counseling for your mental health, this will go a long way.

Non-economic damages are not just about what you suffer immediately after the accident. They also should take into account the way your life has changed, if it has, since the accident. If there are hobbies and activities that you used to love, such as rock climbing or kayaking, which you can now no longer take part in because of your injuries, your damages should reflect this loss and provide some kind of compensation for your loss of enjoyment of life.

Studies show that those who bring a personal injury claim with a lawyer tend to come away with a larger settlement than those who don’t, even after the legal fees have been removed.