Beaumont Residents: How to Determine the Worth of Your Personal Injury Accident Claim

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What’s My Case Worth?

What is worth a broken arm? How about a bulging vertebral disc that induces six months of nerve pain in the arm before it is repaired by surgery? What if it doesn’t operate for surgery? 

Sadly, there is no science about this. Here’s the insane way our culture finds out what a broken arm is worth: we’re taking twelve people away from their jobs and their families, making them sit in painful chairs in a courtroom, asking them to listen to a bunch of witnesses tell their stories, then locking them in a room and not letting them come out until they’ve determined how much the broken arm is worth. 

It may seem insane to let a jury decide, but it is a mechanism designed to be fair to all parties concerned. And a better way, I can’t think of. Are you able to? 

Since each trial will have a different jury, it is difficult to determine how much a personal injury lawsuit will be “worthy” in any absolutes. Of course, over 95 percent of cases never go to a jury

Look at Past Cases That Are Similar to Yours

By figuring out what a jury will think, we determine how much those things are worth. As attorneys, we look at other “like” cases in the past, see what juries awarded in them and make our best guess based on any information we know about the situation, the medical history, any relevant rules, the personalities and backgrounds of the persons involved, the proof of whose fault the accident was the policy limits, and so on. You will need to do the same if you plan to try your case yourself – which is why some people feel the need to employ an injury attorney near Beaumont.

A Lot to Consider Than Just Your Injury

But because twelve human beings determine the worth during a trial, with all the faults and biases that human beings have, there is a lot more to consider than just the injury. It will matter a lot how much the jury likes you. It will also count how much the witnesses like them. And how much the person who hit you likes them. The judge has a tremendous amount of discretion, and the judge’s decisions will influence a trial. It matters a lot how good the doctors are at educating a jury. It matters what the police report says. 

So many things matter that after an extensive investigation has been completed, it is just not possible to find out what a case is worth. But there are rules, of course. 

Here’s one: it’s probably worth less than you think your case is worth but more than the insurance adjuster is prepared to pay. While a book will not tell you what your particular case is worth, we can inform you about the various kinds of “danger.”

 

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