Car Accident Case Value

Answer:

When meeting with new clients, one of the most common questions that we get about car accident cases in Washington is, “What is my case worth?” That’s a really difficult question to answer at the outset of a case because there are a number of factors that will determine your case value, and many of those factors aren’t known until you’re done with treatment.

There’s going to be three primary factors that determine the value of your case. The first is what your injuries are. Again, you don’t typically know the full extent of your injuries within a week of the crash, so it’s going to take weeks, if not months, to get a full picture of what your injuries are. Generally speaking, the more severe your injuries, the more your case is worth.The second thing that will determine the value of your case is your treatment and medical bills. Generally speaking, the greater your medical bills, the more your case is worth. I’d give a caveat there that the type of treatment you get matters. A $20,000 chiropractic bill is not going to be weighed as heavily as a $20,000 surgical bill, for example.

The third thing that’s going to determine the value of your case would be the type of recovery you make. If you make a full recovery and at the end of treatment you’re feeling great, just like you did before the crash, then that’s fantastic, but that means your case is worth less than, for example, somebody who treats and never fully recovers from their injury. What a personal injury attorney will do at the end of your treatment is assess all of those factors and give you a settlement range, so they’ll tell you your case is worth between X and Y and help you make a decision about how to best get you into that range.