If you’ve had an accident and are suffering from an injury because of the accident, you will definitely want to contact a personal injury lawyer. You might be able to walk away with monetary funds because of your accident and injury, but a skilled personal injury attorney will need to defend you in order to plead your case.
You should never try and file a personal injury lawsuit on your own since it requires specialized training and skills in order to be successful, especially if you want to walk away with compensation. You just hire a personal injury attorney if you’ve suffered long-term or permanent disabling injuries, suffered severe injuries, if there are multiple parties involved and liability is not clear or if an insurance company refuses to pay out a claim or engages in bad faith tactics.
Contacting a reputable personal injury lawyer will help you during settlement negotiations so that you walk away with what you deserve. When you file a claim against another person, company or your job because of bodily harm, you’ll want to know what the value of your injuries are so that you and your lawyer can negotiate a reasonable and fair award. But figuring out the exact amount of money that should be awarded for your losses can be tough.
There’s no exact formula to calculate the right amount and everyone’s case will be different. Your overall settlement will depend on the unique circumstances that led up to your injury. But despite not having an exact formula to calculate your potential award from your personal injury claim, you can get an estimate by knowing a few things, such as your medical costs, lost wages and your emotional and physical distress.
What Your Injury Claim Will Be Worth?
It doesn’t matter what kind of injury you have, know that there will be some kind of loses. Insurance companies will use the term “damages” as a way to describe the losses. In the insurance industry, there are two kinds of damages: special and general. Special damages are also considered economic damages and measure how much money you lost and will continue to lose because of the injury.
These “special” categories include things like lost wages from time off or work, medical bills and the like. General damages are also considered non-economic damages and are thought of as intangible loses that you endured because of the accident and will continue to endure in the future. These include emotional trauma and pain.
Because special damages are easier to calculate because of actual proof, general damages aren’t as easy. Your pain and suffering will be different from another person’s, even if the two had the same accident. General damages include things like emotional distress, loss of consortium, depression or anxiety, not being able to concentrate, loss of consortium, sleep loss and more.
To figure out how much you might get, multiply the total of what your special damages are by one or two to get a pretty fair estimate of what your pain and suffering value is. Usually, insurance companies will accept this number for mild to moderate personal injury claims. But for severe injuries, you can times your special damages by three or four (possibly even more), depending on the severity of your pain and suffering.
What Do High-Dollar Personal Injury Cases Take into Account?
If you’ve been in a severe personal injury accident, you might be entitled to a high-dollar settlement. Here are some calculations that are factored into high-dollar personal injury awards:
- A shocking event – Things like plane crashes, shootings or any other shocking event can garner higher than usual general damage monetary funds in a personal injury claim.
- Permanent injuries or persistent pain – Being in constant and never-ending pain that is permanent from injuries like amputations, scarring or paralysis can usually support claims for higher settlements.
- Extreme mental damage – If you’re experiencing extreme mental anguish before of the personal injury, you might be entitled to higher compensation. This will be much easier to prove if you now need the care of a mental health professional after your personal injury accident.
Only you can really assess how much you’re in pain or suffering, but the real challenge is trying to convince this to the insurance company. So, when you’re trying to calculate your settlement from your personal injury case, it’s important to try and think like an adjuster, which a skilled personal injury lawyer will do.
Just remember that when making an initial demand, to make it big enough so that there is plenty of room to negotiate. If you want to settle for $100,000, then demand $120,000 so that there is room to negotiate by both parties. There are really no rules when it comes to injury settlement negotiations and every case will be different.
It’s a delicate process, which is why it’s best that you let a professional personal injury lawyer handle it for you. You don’t want to reduce your demand too fast or else you’ll risk leaving some money on the table. But then again, if you reduce it too slow, the adjuster might then lose interest in the case and not want to increase the offer.
If There Were A Settlement Formula
Although there is no one true settlement formula, if there were one, it might look something like this:
- Past and future medical bills + Past and future lost wages + Pain and suffering damages
- From there, choose a number you feel comfortable. Just remember that you’ll still need to include your lawyer’s fees, so increase it a bit to include these costs.
You’ll need to speak to a personal injury attorney in more detail to find out a better approximation of what amount to expect from your particular personal injury case. At One Law Group in Beverly Hills, our lawyers are ready to help you with your case. We’ll help take the pressure off yourself and provide you with peace of mind while you recover. Give us a call at (844) 626-1529 today!