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We’ve probably all seen a fancy personal injury calculator on a legal website meant to give us a sense for what our personal injury claim might be worth. We’ve got one such calculator below if you’d like to start playing with some numbers. But do these calculators work? For those who love to read, we’ve created an in-depth look at how the average personal injury settlement calculator works and what its limitations are. For everyone else, we’ve created a short video. Enjoy!
Before we calculate, lets relate
If you’ve been injured due to someone else’s negligence, naturally you’re very interested in the compensation amount that you might receive to help you recover. But before we get into the dollars and cents of what your personal injury claim might be worth, we want to acknowledge that an injury can be an emotional, painful, life-altering challenge. You’re not just a payday to us. You’re a person. We have been Tacoma’s compassionate advocates for over 40 years with a focus on taking amazing care of our clients. So, while the numbers matter a lot to you, our Tacoma personal injury attorney team won’t treat you like a number. With that said, let’s dig into the numbers…
The average personal injury settlement calculator
We have created our own personal injury calculator here, so you can play with some of the numbers involved in your case. However, we share this calculator with one major caution. We want you to know that whatever number it gives you, it is at best a very loose estimate (for details on this, read on below the calculator).
How does the typical personal injury calculator work?
You can find personal injury calculators on a number of websites, and even on Google, believe it or not. Some insurance companies use highly sophisticated computer programs, which operate using the same theories as a personal injury calculator to estimate the value of the personal injury award. The average personal injury settlement calculator works like this:
- It prompts you to enter what lawyers call your “special damages,” all of your easy-to- calculate financial costs due to the accident (e.g. medical bills, medication costs, lost wages past and future, replacing or repairing a damaged vehicle, etc.)
- Then they ask you to enter a “general-damages multiplier,” a number that your special damages will be multiplied by to put a financial value on your more general losses (e.g. pain and suffering, decreased quality of life, severity of injury, etc.).
The reason personal injury calculators work this way is that attorneys and insurance companies in the past used multipliers to multiply special damages to arrive at the damage award. Today, that model is a little too simple.
The fatal flaw of the personal injury calculator
Personal injury calculators can easily get your hopes up or discourage you for no real reason because they fail to account for all the factors involved in a case and because so much depends on the accuracy of the multiplier you use to calculate your general damages, Here’s just one example of how the calculator’s multiplier method can break down, failing to account for all of the realities of the case.
Using a multiplier in a situation where a person doesn’t get enough medical treatment for their injury for whatever reason will yield a lower value than if somebody overtreated and incurred significant medical expense. However, usually an insurance company or jury will discount medical expenses if they believe that there has been overtreatment or treatment that is not reasonably related to the injury. A trained lawyer can usually give you a more accurate sense of what your case might be worth for three simple reasons:
- It’s a personal injury attorney’s job to know all of the right questions to ask to help determine an accurate multiplier.
- A personal injury lawyer is paid to make themselves familiar with case law — records of past cases that are pertinent to your case and the payouts of those cases.
- An experienced personal injury lawyer will likely have assisted with cases like yours, giving them more insight into achievable outcomes.
Why we want you to know the facts about personal injury value calculators
Just like any business, law firms have business models. Some have decided to make their living by getting a large volume of cases. Others choose to make their living by taking fewer cases and giving them the personal attention needed to hopefully get great results. We don’t use personal injury calculators to herd a high volume of clients through our door and then hand off our cases to an office full of inexperienced paralegals. Our personal injury attorneys personally work on every personal injury case in our office. We can’t promise miracles, but we feel confident that this strategy is in your best interest if you’ve been injured due to the fault of someone else. Please contact us today if you need help. Our team of Tacoma personal injury lawyers is here for you.
