Your lawyer has been handling your personal injury claim for almost two years now. It’s been in suit for a year, trial is set for four months from now, and still your lawyer won’t tell you how much your case is worth. What's going on here?
What's Behind the Question?
"How much is my personal injury case worth?" It's one of the most common questions on claimants' minds (right up there with How long will my personal injury claim take?).
The first thing to understand is what personal injury lawyers mean when they talk about how much a case is worth. When discussing claim value, a lawyer generally means the settlement value of the case. No lawyer can ever predict what a jury is going to award at trial. That’s why many lawyers refer to going to trial as “throwing the dice.” Once you go to trial, all bets are off. Anything can happen. And that’s why plaintiffs settle before trial. They want to avoid the risk of something really bad happening, like losing the case outright or being awarded only a minimum amount of money. (More: I want to take my personal case to trial but my lawyer wants to settle.)
Is All the Evidence In?
With respect to a case’s settlement value, even the most experienced lawyer will have a difficult time offering a meaningful opinion until all of the evidence is in and can’t be changed. “All of the evidence is in” means all of the witnesses have been deposed, all of the relevant documents have been produced, and it is very unlikely that any new witnesses or documents are going to suddenly show up. (This is all part of the discovery phase of a lawsuit.)
Until the evidence is in, something unexpected can always happen, changing the value of the claim, including:
- a witness can change his/her story
- a witness can lie
- a witness can die or disappear
- a new witness can suddenly appear
- a doctor’s diagnosis or prognosis can change
- the plaintiff can get better or worse, or be sent to a new doctor, who has a different opinion from all of the other treating doctors
- the insurer sends the plaintiff to a new insurance doctor, or
- the defense attorney finds evidence that the plaintiff was lying or hid evidence.
Let’s see how some of these events can change the settlement value of a case.
Let’s say you have a standard car accident case. You were hit at an intersection, and it is likely that the other driver will be found negligent. You suffered a herniated disc, and you missed six months of work. All of these things make your case a reasonably good case.
But until all of the evidence is in, anything can change. What if a month before trial, the defense attorney finally finds a missing witness who saw the collision? That witness swears that you ran a red light. If that witness’s story is reasonably credible, the settlement value of your case just went down by a lot.
Or what if the defense attorney finds out that you lied at your deposition about your criminal background? That’s going to hurt the settlement value of your case, since that could make you a less sympathetic witness in the eyes of a jury.
On the other hand, what if the insurance doctor’s report from the independent medical examination really hurts your case, but your lawyer deposes and completely discredits the doctor before trial, to the point that the defense attorney is now convinced that the jury is never going to believe the doctor? Now the settlement value of your case just went up, possibly by a lot.
And so on. The point here is that any change in the evidence can change the settlement value of a personal injury case. So that is why a wise plaintiff’s lawyer will never commit to a firm settlement value for a case until he/she has deposed all of the significant witnesses and made sure that all relevant documents have been produced. More: Settlement FAQ.