A common question I get with clients that call in is, “What is my claim worth? What are the injuries or damage that I’m sustaining potentially worth?” The short answer is that it really depends. It depends on a variety of factors. First, it depends on the injuries that you sustained, and early on it’s very difficult to tell what someone’s injury is going to be while undergoing a course of treatment. An injury that initially seemed simple and relatively minor may, in fact, turn out to be something very complex and dangerous, so we don’t want to assume something too early on and underestimate what we’re dealing with. We also don’t know the extent of the treatment you’ll need. It’s not immediately apparent what the best course of treatment will be, much less what that treatment will cost and how you’ll be able to get it.
We also have to consider, who is the individual that injured you? Was it a drunk driver? Or was it a corporate entity? The ability to win damages from a single individual is different from the ability to win damages from companies, and the approach to each is quite different. To know how to proceed best, we need to know exactly who we’re going up against and what their strengths and weaknesses are. It also helps to know their what their ability is when it comes to compensating you. Again, the differences between a single individual’s ability to compensate you for an injury and the ability of a large corporation are worlds apart.
What type of accident happened? Was it simply a matter of negligence, or was in an intentional tort? Or was it strict liability? There are many different types of accidents, all of which are governed by their own set of statutes and regulations, and without knowing the specifics of your situation, it’s hard to estimate what set of procedures we’ll be using, not to mention what those procedures will yield. There are many scenarios that crop up time and time again. Car accidents, slip and falls, product liability, and dog attacks are all cases that we’ve worked with extensively, so if your case falls into a category like that, it may be easier to give you an estimate of what your case is worth. If your circumstances are more unique or have more mitigating factors involved, more information is vital to painting an accurate picture of what your case’s best-case scenario will be.
All these factors go together to really determine what the claim is potentially worth, and we don’t want to oversell or undersell and damages we might attain. But we do have a general idea based on past experience of all the case that we’ve handled in certain scenarios. If you’re wondering, you’ve been injured, what is my case worth, give us a call. What we can do is provide for you a general idea based upon the injuries that you sustained and what you’re going through. Knowing the type of injury, some information on the other party, and the nature of the incident, we can give you an estimate of what your case may be potentially worth.
