How much money will I get from my settlement?

Straight Talk About How Much Money You Will Get from Your Personal Injury Accident Settlement

 

If you are injured in an accident and you are considering a personal injury claim, you have lots of questions. But all questions are aimed at getting to the same point: how much money will I actually get out of my settlement or verdict? In the real world, this is the most pressing question our clients have. And it should be.

First, let's be clear, you can Google until you are blue in the face and you are not going to get anything resembling an exact answer to the question of how much money you will get in a personal injury settlement. Any lawyer who suggest they can give you a real value in a free consultation is, to put it generously, blowing smoke. But what you can find on this website is information that will give you a better idea of (1) what your case is worth, and (2) what that value actually means to you in terms of money in your pocket.

This page will give you a ton of information and statistics about your case. But if you have a serious injury case, you need a lawyer to fight for you. If our law firm does anything, it fights for our clients for every last penny we can get either by way of settlement or trial. If you have a serious personal injury case - our office handles only serious injury cases - and you want someone who will fight for the compensation you know you deserve, call 800-553-8082 or get a free online consultation here.

The Search for a Settlement Formula

Clearly, there is absolutely a settlement formula for personal injury car accident claims in jurisdictions like Maryland:

Past Medical Bills

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Future Medical Bills

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Past Lost Wages

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Future Lost Wages

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Pain and Suffering Damages

This is the formula to calculate your settlement in a car accident case, assuming there is no dispute as to who actually caused the car accident (we will get to malpractice and product liability cases in a second) in states like Maryland that do not have a collateral source rule. In these jurisdictions, you are able to get money for all of your medical bills and lost wages, even if they were paid by an outside source.

But what does this "settlement formula" do you for? You might, in some cases, be able to compute the first four variables. But, in the vast majority of our cases, the greatest harm in the case is pain - usually physical - pain. How do you measure the pain and suffering that goes with physical and emotional injury? Well, that depends on so many different factors with different weights depending upon the case. In some types of car and truck accident cases, insurance companies will try to use a computer program to calculate a settlement formula, by having the insurance adjuster put all of the details of the medical records into a computer to spit out a settlement range for the insurance payout.

In very small accident cases, this is not an awful idea. In serious injury cases - the types of cases we handle - a computer system trying to manufacturer a settlement formula is as abomination of justice. (You can get a full look at how insurance companies value cases here. At the bottom of this article, you can read about your specific injury and how those claims have been valued by juries.)

We have earned tens of millions of dollars for victims by fighting every single case like it was our last case. Can we help you? Call 800-553-8082 or get an online consultation.

In most car and truck accident cases, if there is a serious dispute of liability, the case is most likely going to trial. Medical malpractice and products liability cases are a different beast. The same formula applies in malpractice, product defect, and premises liability cases with one addition: you have to multiply the likelihood of success on the question of whether the defendant is at fault for the accident by the formula's calculation. So if your case is worth $2 million but you have an 80% chance of winning the case, your "settlement formula" calculation would be $1.6 million.

How Much of My Settlement Money Do I Actually Get?

This is the real question, right? How much money will you actually put in your pocket? This is what personal injury cases are about. No doubt, there is more to life than money. But a personal injury case is almost always about money. This does not mean you would not rather have your pain go away, or your loved one come back, than get as much money as possible.

Let's go back to that $2 million case that settled for $1.6 million because of the risk of a defense verdict at trial. Realistically, injury victims are not getting all of this money. There are, in most cases, two big setoffs: (1) attorneys' fees and expenses and, (2) outstanding medical bills and medical liens.

Attorneys' Fees

Attorneys' fees are easy to figure out; they should be carefully spelled out in the retainer agreement. For our clients, the fees are the same in every single case we have: 33% of the recovery if the case settles before a lawsuit is filed and 40% of the recovery if the case settles after the claim is filed.

So, your attorneys' fees under this scenario would be $533,333. Your second attorney related deduction is your expenses. Our firm fronts all of the client expenses (and swallows those expenses if you lose) but gets those expenses back from the recovery. How much are client expenses? It literally varies from less than $100 to well over $100,000 if your case goes to trial. It depends on the case. You can't know the exact amount that your expenses will be, but you can have a open and clear line of communication with your attorney as to what the expenses are, and what they may be in a given case. If you settle a serious injury case before filing a lawsuit, the expenses will be a fraction of what they would be if you take the case to trial.

Medical Bills and Medical Liens

The last big line item - again in most cases, though there are exceptions - is medical bills and/or medical liens. Medical bills are an easy one. You have to pay back the provider for your medical bills. On most medical bills, the client has an option as to whether they want their lawyers.

To negotiate down the bill and pay the claim out of the settlement or simply to leave the bills open. Some medical bills lawyers may be required to pay some medical bills out of a settlement as a matter of law. Some health care providers who know they have an car accident case will require the plaintiff to sign an "assignment and authorization" requiring the lawyer to reach an agreement to pay back the health care provider (or place the money in escrow). In Maryland and in many other states, hospitals have the ability to place a lien requiring the lawyers to pay (or, again, escrow) some portion of their bill.

Medical liens are a little more tricky and the rules are going to vary by state. Let's talk about Maryland because that is where we handle the vast majority of our personal injury accident/malpractice cases. In Maryland, the insurance company has a contractual right in many cases to be repaid for the money that they have paid out in medical bills (or you risk both breaching your contract and losing your health insurance). Let's say you have $200,000 in medical bills and your health insurance company is CareFirst, a common insurer in Maryland. CareFirst gets $200,000 in bills submitted from the health care providers. But they are not paying out $200,000, they are sending the providers $150,000 to extinguish those bills. In the majority of cases we handle, the medical providers do not "balance bill" the client for the remaining $50,000. Our lawyers are going to fight like crazy to avoid our client from getting balance billed. But this depends on the jurisdiction and the language of the health insurance policy.

Whether you have outstanding medical bills or medical liens, the best personal injury lawyers do not stop fighting for their clients when they get a verdict or settlement. Personal injury attorneys who really fight for their clients work to get those medical bills and medical liens reduced.

So, in summary, there is no average personal injury settlement calculator but if you do your research - see more below - you have a chance of getting a pretty good understanding of what the settlement ranges for your case might be.

Getting a Lawyer to Fight to Get You the Most Money Possible

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