For a significant personal injury or wrongful death case, an online settlement calculator cannot reliably tell you what your case is worth. If you search online for the value of a personal injury case, you may find websites offering “settlement calculators” that ask for information such as medical expenses, lost wages, and injury severity, then apply a multiplier or formula to estimate what your case may be worth.
Those calculations can be misleading. Some large personal injury firms offer online tools that may help explain general factors affecting a claim, but no online calculator can reliably determine the value of a serious case, because significant cases are not valued by a mathematical formula.
How Do Personal Injury Settlement Calculators Work?
Most online settlement calculators use a simplified formula, asking for information about medical expenses, lost income, property damage, future medical treatment, the seriousness of the injury, and pain and suffering, then applying a multiplier to the economic damages to generate an estimated range.
That approach may produce a number. It does not necessarily produce a meaningful valuation.
Why Can’t a Calculator Tell Me What My Case Is Worth?
Two people can have similar medical expenses and dramatically different cases. The value of a significant personal injury claim can depend on issues that cannot be captured by entering a few numbers into an online form, including:
- The nature and permanence of the injuries, and whether future medical treatment or surgery will be required;
- Lost earning capacity, and the effect of the injuries on the person’s daily life;
- The strength of the evidence establishing liability, and whether responsibility is disputed;
- The available insurance and other sources of recovery, and the defendants involved;
- The jurisdiction where the case may be tried, and how the evidence is likely to be presented to a jury.
In a catastrophic injury case, future medical care alone may require detailed analysis from physicians, life-care planners, economists, and other experts. A settlement calculator cannot perform that analysis.
Is There a Standard Multiplier for Pain and Suffering in Georgia?
No. There is no standard formula requiring pain-and-suffering damages in a Georgia personal injury case to equal a particular multiple of medical expenses, despite websites suggesting medical bills can be multiplied by two, three, five, or another number.
Medical expenses can be relevant evidence, but they do not automatically establish the value of what an injured person has experienced or will experience in the future. A catastrophic spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, permanent physical impairment, or death cannot realistically be reduced to a predetermined multiplier.
What Actually Determines the Value of a Serious Injury Case?
A meaningful case evaluation starts with understanding both damages and liability.
The damages analysis may include the person’s medical condition, prognosis, future treatment, lost income or earning capacity, permanent limitations, pain and suffering, and the effect of the injury on the person’s life and family. The liability analysis asks a different set of questions: What happened? Who was responsible? What evidence proves it? Are there additional responsible people or companies? What insurance or other sources of recovery may be available?
In significant cases, the answers may not be known immediately, since evidence may need to be preserved, records obtained, witnesses interviewed, and experts brought in to evaluate insurance coverage and potentially responsible companies. That is why a responsible lawyer may be reluctant to place a precise value on a catastrophic injury case at the beginning of the representation.
Can an Insurance Company’s Settlement Estimate Be Trusted?
Not necessarily. Insurance companies evaluate claims too, but their objective is different from yours.
An insurer may use claims software, prior settlement data, internal evaluation procedures, and adjuster experience to determine how much it is willing to pay. That number is not an independent determination of what the case is worth. It is the insurer’s evaluation of what it believes it should pay to resolve the claim.
In a serious case, those can be very different things.
When Can a Lawyer Determine What My Case Is Worth?
There is no universal point at which every case can be accurately valued. In some cases, the injuries and liability become clear relatively quickly. In others, meaningful valuation may require substantial investigation, medical development, expert analysis, discovery, or litigation.
A lawyer evaluating a significant case should understand enough about the injuries, future consequences, liability evidence, defendants, and available sources of recovery before recommending that a client accept a settlement. An early estimate can change substantially as those facts develop.
Talk to Goldstein Hayes About What Your Case May Be Worth
Goldstein Hayes Trial Lawyers represents individuals and families in catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases throughout Georgia and in select matters beyond the state.
We do not use an online formula to determine what a significant case is worth. Our evaluation begins with the evidence: what happened, who may be responsible, the nature and long-term consequences of the injuries, the available insurance and other sources of recovery, and what will be necessary to prove the case if it must be tried.
That approach reflects the types of cases we handle. Our results include a $150 million jury verdict in a trucking wrongful death case, and our lawyers have obtained more than 100 trucking case results exceeding $1 million. That is part of a track record that has recovered nearly $1 billion for injured people and grieving families.*
*Past results do not determine the outcome or value of another case. Every case is different.
If you or a family member suffered a catastrophic injury or wrongful death and are trying to understand what the case may actually be worth, contact us by calling (404) 869-8600 to request a confidential case review.
