Valuing Personal Injury Accident Cases

Average Personal Injury Settlements and Awards and How Your Claim is Valued for Money Damages

More Case Value Information

People are uncomfortable talking about money.  Judges, juries, lawyers, and clients are all uncomfortable talking about money.  Society tells us that such talk is impolite. Maybe society is right.  But the very purpose of our legal system in personal injury cases is to fairly compensate the injury victim for his/her injuries with money damages. 

Accordingly, the goal of a Maryland personal injury lawyer is for the client to be monetarily compensated for his/her injuries. Because compensation is our lawyers' goal, discussion of the value of your personal injury case is necessary. Accordingly, accident and injury lawyers need to move past this social custom and discuss the issues related to the value of your personal injury case. Accident and malpractice victims should have honest and detailed discussions with their personal injury lawyer about the settlement value and trial value of your personal injury accident or medical malpractice case. Ultimately, the question is quite simple: what is the value of my case?

Values of Serious Personal Injury Cases

Predicting the trial value or even settlement value of a serious personal injury case with precision is difficult.  There are many factors that can affect the value of a case.  Assuming the insurance company believes, based on past experience, that your personal injury lawyer is ready, willing and able to go to trial, the settlement value of a serious injury case is a prediction of what six Maryland jurors will believe your claim is worth because serious injury cases in Maryland invariably are decided by juries.The jury decides how much money to award you for your injuries. Accordingly, different juries will arrive at diffjuryerent verdicts under the same set of circumstances. Jurors bring with them, just as all of us do, their own personal biases that can either help or hurt you. Accordingly, this unpredictability leads to a wide range of results. So for settlement purposes, the accident lawyers and insurance companies take an average of what they believe a jury would award. If they generally agree on what that average is, the case will typically settle if the client agrees.

One fact of life in determining the settlement value of a personal injury case is that the value increases over time. More than 95% of the time, the value of a Maryland injury case will increase from the time before suit is filed to the time of (or day before) trial. Our accident lawyers have had cases where the pretrial offer was 20 times the pre-suit offer. This is particularly true in medical malpractice cases which are virtually impossible to settle without filing a lawsuit. In other injury cases, we have settled cases for hundreds of thousands of dollars when the pre-suit offer was zero. (See our attorneys' testimonials for a sampling of these instances.) Our lawyers present the facts to the client, narrowly tailored to their specific case, and let our personal injury clients make the call whether to proceed or to continue to move forward with the litigation process.
Studies Looking at Value of Personal Injury Cases

There is data available to give injury victims some general notion of the personal injury awards accident victims are receiving in personal injury cases in Maryland. In 2010, a company that analyzes jury verdicts in personal injury cases did a study that found that the nationwide median jury award in a personal injury case was approximately $40,000 and plaintiffs win 48% of jury trial. The average personal injury verdict, as opposed to the median verdict, is $985,675. Take this with a grain of salt. This includes a $325 million verdict and other verdicts that are not realistic in many personal injury cases, particularly in states like Maryland with caps on noneconomic damages.

Verdicts in Maryland Personal Injury Lawsuits

In Maryland personal injury cases, much to the chagrin of Maryland lawyers, the median compensatory award in personal injury trials was $12,813. The good news for Maryland lawyers and their clients is that the plaintiff prevailed in 69% of the cases (as opposed to 55% nationally).

      Maryland plaintiffs prevailed in 83% of auto accident personal injury cases. The average jury award in Maryland car accident personal injury cases was $11,925. In contrast, plaintiffs prevailed in only 8% of medical malpractice cases in Maryland (bearing in mind that most meritorious cases settle before trial) but the average jury award in medical malpractice cases was $808,772. The study does not breakdown these jury verdicts by county, but clearly the larger jury awards in Maryland are in Baltimore City and Prince George's County.This data, which was of great interest to Maryland accident lawyers with respect to the gap between Maryland and the rest of the nation, was generated by an analysis of 250,000 personal injury cases in Maryland and across the country from 2001-2008.

Our Attorneys' Results in Personal Injury Cases

      If the data above is discouraging, you might be comforted to know that our attorneys' average is over 10 times the Maryland average. These averages also include include a lot of lawyers who do not have a clue about how to handle a personal injury case and a lot of lawsuits that never shoul have been filed. . Good, well-prepared lawyers (and there are many good personal injury attorneys in Maryland) who have a good client, meticulously prepare a case and then present it honestly and fairly to a jury, typically get much better jury awards than those who do not.

The Factors That Matter in Personal Injury Cases

      But these verdict statistics and our law firms' verdicts in personal injury cases are clearly not predictive of the result in any individual Maryland personal injury case. It sounds cliche but your case is unique. You need to discuss with your lawyer the specific facts of your personal injury case, the possible defenses that may be asserted by the defendant's lawyer, and come to a conclusion about the value of your case. This discussion will also include the severity of the injuries you suffered, the amount of available insurance, how clear the causal connection is between your injuries and the accident, how strong your liability case is, the quality of all of the witnesses, and the expected jury perceptions of you and the defendant (a Maryland jury is not told in a personal injury trial that the defendant has an insurance policy).

This discussion with your lawyer will also include analysis of the venue where the case is being tried. In Maryland, as we mentioned earlier, Baltimore City and Prince George's County are favorable venues for plaintiffs. Conversely, in more rural areas of Maryland, such as Baltimore County or Wicomico County, for example, the jury awards are more conservative. This is true not just in Maryland but throughout the United States -- jury awards are typically higher in urban areas than in rural areas. That said, some of the best jurisdictions in the country for personal injury victims are Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, states that have very large rural populations.

Value of Smaller Personal Injury Cases

      It is not difficult to predict the settlement value of a smaller personal injury case in Maryland where the injuries are not substantial. Cases in Maryland where the value of the case is less than $25,000 cannot be predicted with exact certainty but an experienced injury lawyer in Maryland can predict the value to a reasonable degree of confidence within a relatively narrow range. The outcome is more predictable in smaller cases because the case will be decided by a District Court judge rather than a jury. Accordingly, if you know the amount of lost wages, the injuries, and the way the injured client will appear at trial, a seasoned Maryland accident lawyer familiar with the district court judges in the particular county where the case is being tried can generally make a close prediction as to how the judge might rule on that case.

How the Insurance Companies Determine Value in Accident Cases

      Typically, most of the insurance companies our lawyers deal with in Maryland injury cases use computer software to determine the value of car, truck, and motorcycle accident cases. Most use a computer system called Colossus, which is reportedly used by more than 50 percent of the nation's claims insurance adjusters. Many other insurance companies use a similar program. The insurance adjuster inputs the data received from your lawyers, your medical records and the amount of your lost wages. Colossus then considers the severity of the accident and where the accident occurred (or where suit could be brought). Colossus will give a higher value for a case in a venue considered favorable for accident victims, such as Baltimore City or Prince George's County, than it would for the same case in, for example, Garrett County, Anne Arundel County, or Montgomery County in Maryland.

Tips on Each Insurance Company

      Colossus and its progeny consider whether your accident lawyer has a history of successfully taking trials to verdict in Maryland or whether the accident lawyer simply settles all of his/her personal injury cases. Both the computer and the insurance adjusters know which lawyers just settle their cases without even considering a trial if the offer is unreasonable. This is one of many reasons why the quality of your accident attorney matters so much even if you intend to settle your case without filing a lawsuit or going to trial. Colossus then specifically looks to your injuries as described in your medical records.

One of the most important questions is whether the injuries are permanent. Colossus also gives higher values for objective injuries (broken bones, herniated discs) measured by diagnostic testing than soft tissue injuries. It does give, however, values for muscle spasm (for which Colossus gives particular weight in cases without a defined objective injury), restriction on movement, radiating pain, anxiety, depression, headaches, dizziness, and visual disturbance. Colossus also gives greater value in accident cases where the patient went to the hospital for initial treatment of the injuries immediately after the accident.

      Colossus takes this information and generates a range of settlement values for that accident case. While Colossus and similar programs do have some value, the problem with them is they cannot grasp the complexity of a human's pain and suffering. There is no computer that can ascertain pain and suffering or how an injury really impacted a person's life. How much is it worth to not be able to pick up your newborn baby without extreme pain? There is no way a computer can answer this question.

      This is why your personal injury lawyer must fully explain why your injuries are different or be prepared to file a lawsuit. When your accident lawyer files a lawsuit, the insurance companies will sometimes take a second look at the real trial value of the case, particularly when they know that the accident lawyers handling the case are willing to go to trial. While Colossus cannot appreciate pain, suffering and the true impact of the injury on the victim, judges and juries tend to listen to and consider many of the factors that Colossus ignores because it does not understand them. It is only a formula. Juries make distinctions on how much your case is worth based upon whether or not they think the plaintiff is an honest good person who has suffered as a result of their injuries.

Clearly, the true value of the same injury can vary widely. If your injury is a scar on your face, the value a jury will place on the scar is going to depend on the Plaintiff. Sex, age, pride in appearance, all of these things are going to matter in determining vacourtlue. The same goes for ankle and leg injuries where the victim can no longer run. If you are a couch potato, the value is different for you than for the client who can tell a jury they ran a marathon or played soccer every week in the yard with their kids just two years ago. These details matter to every juror but the computer tunes them out completely.

      In reality, juries are in many ways the opposite of Colossus because juries respond to human pain and suffering. A jury may not award damages based on the nuances of a C4/C5 cervical (neck) herniated disc injury but it will award damages because Mom used to be a shopaholic for her three kids at Christmas time but now cannot get off a bench at the mall because her neck hurts too much when she walks. A computer cannot understand this kind of impact and never will. The very purpose of a jury in our legal system is to take these types of intangibles into consideration to render a fair verdict.

     Our Maryland personal injury attorneys handle accident, product liability and malpractice cases in Maryland and, in particularly serious cases, thoughout the country. If you have been injured by a defective product, medical malpractice, or a truck accident, car accident, or motorcycle accident, call to speak to one of our malpractice or accident attorneys at 800-553-8082 or select here for a free no obligation consultation.

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If You Need an Experienced Personal Injury Lawyer

     Our accident and malpractice lawyers handle personal injury accident and malpractice cases in Maryland but also throughout the country. If you or a loved one has suffered a serious personal injury as the result of the negligence of someone else, call our personal injury lawyers at 800-553-8082 or get a free on-line consultation.