what is my personal injury claim worth
hi I'm an attorney at Denman Perlman in Tampa Florida and today we're gonna talk about how we value personal injury claims .
when we're valuing personal injury claims we're looking at a couple of different components and then we're adding them all up to figure out what a dollar amount value will be for your claim
so here's what we're looking at the first question
we have to answer is what is the money available okay so if you've been in an auto wreck and somebody else caused an accident
but that person doesn't have any insurance for whatever reason or they don't have a penny to their name then the value of the case is gonna be very limited because there isn't any money to go get on
insurance coverage
the flipside if you've been in an auto wreck and the person who hit you has a million dollar insurance coverage then you know that's not going to be an issue
okay then there's gonna be enough money available to compensate you for the full value of your claim
so the second question we ask is what are the total medical bills in your case
so a personal injury claim by very nature has injuries and injuries are treated in hospitals or urgent cares or by chiropractors or by orthopedist s--
and they're all done in a medical setting and they all have medical bills associated with it and so these are economic damages and we want to know what the total economic damages are in your case
the total medical bills we also want to know what your total out-of-pocket is in other words what has insurance covered or what has your pip insurance covered
auto accident claim
if it's an auto accident claim we next want to find out what your lost wages are this is another sort of economic damage
right it's something that we can put an actual to the penny we can figure out what your lost wages are and so if you had to leave work under doctor's orders and you weren't able to work for a couple of weeks and you make twenty bucks an hour
and we can figure out the exact dollar amount of your lost wage claim
now the next question and this is a big one and in an injury cases what is your pain and suffering and this is an intangible amount
it's not like medical bills or we can say your pain and suffering was worth to a penny this particular number
it depends okay and what it depends on is how has this accident affected your life and there's two different places that we're looking at one
is what are the things that you used to be able to do and you can't do now what has been taken from you maybe you used to go to the gym everyday or maybe you used to run every day
and now you can't do that and so that is a part of pain and suffering that we'll sit down and figure out the value for to do the best we can to compensate you for what's been taken from you
the second part is what are the things that you still do because you have to do them but they're really hard to do right now
so for example if you got to work and you still have to go and drag yourself into the office every day or whatever it might be but it hurts now you have to do it but it's it stinks for you now it's painful
the only way you can get through it is to take a bunch of pain med in the morning and then when you go home you pay for it
suffering claim
we call these the technical term is duties under duress but we want to know what those are because that's a big portion of your pain and suffering claim to determine
this will talk to you because you'll know but we're also talking to your family members whether it's your spouse sometimes it's your mother how has it affected them because they can often speak for you better than you can
the last question we want to know is what is the liability in your case
so is it a hundred percent clear that this injury that you have that the accident was caused by somebody else
so for example you have your motor vehicle car wreck where somebody runs a red light and plows into you while you're just parked
in that case we know that liability is 100 percent clear right
it's not your fault at all or is it the situation where it's more vague or maybe there was a sideswipe and it's a little bit harder for us to prove the liability at a hundred percent level and we want to know
that because that factors into your claim and then what we do is this usually takes a few months for us to gather all this information because you don't know the first week after an honor wreck
medical bills
for example what your total medical bills are you have to go to the doctor you have to have let them either get you a hundred percent better or if they can't get you 100% better
we have to get to the point where they say listen we've tried everything we can to get you 100 percent better and we can't and this process can take three months six months whatever the case may be it all depends on your treatment provider
so we have to wait till that's done when it comes to lost wages you may not know a week after an auto wreck or slip and fall how much time you're going to lose it
may take a few months for you to get an understanding of how it's going to affect your your work and how much money are going to be out of pocket and the same thing with pain and suffering
you may not know right away exactly how it's going to affect your life you may think at the very beginning that maybe it's just two weeks that you're out of the gym or maybe it's just the you know a couple of weeks that you're you know not going to be able to to go to your kids sporting events
but as time goes on you'll have a better understanding if this is going to be a permanent thing your pain and suffering is this going to affect you for the rest of your life or is this something that's going to be
for a small period of time but ultimately you're going to get over it and that varies and that factors in greatly with what the total amount of your settlement case value is going to be so after a certain period of time and a lot of its dependent on your treatment providers and your doctors but it's usually somewhere between three and six months you come in and we sit down and we go through all of these factors and we're able to come up with a number as to what the value of your case is going to be and that's what will settle your case for
insurance attorney
and if the insurance attorney and the insurance adjuster does not agree with us and they refuse to settle with us then we file a lawsuit because ultimately
this is your one shot to be compensated for what's happened to you and if you have permanent injuries and this is something that you're gonna live with for the rest of your life then you need to make sure that you get fair value for your claim and and our firm we believe in getting maximum value for every claim we take every case on a case by case basis and I'll leave you with this
which is I have yet to have a client who's been permanently injured that no matter how great the financial settlement is I get to have a client telling me you know what I would rather have this money in hand I'd rather have this money and then go back to where I was before the reality
is it's an imperfect world it's an imperfect system and the best we can do is to put a dollar amount on something that's been taken from you