How Do I Know How Much My Case is Worth?
This is always a difficult question to answer for a client because, at the beginning of the case, you don’t know what’s going to come later in the future. How long will you be out of work because of your injuries? How much medical treatment will you need? Will you need surgery? If it’s a simple type of an injury with a simple fractured bone that heals and there’s a little bit of time out of work because of the injury, those cases are easier to give a more firm answer after you factor in the limit of the insurance policy.
In automobile cases, there are insurance policies that in New York are $25,000 maximum policy limit, $100,000 policy limit, and up. Many people carry the minimum New York limit of $25,000 per person. If a passenger in a car, breaks or fractures a bone, and it heals while they miss a little time from work, oftentimes it is easy to get the $25,000 insurance policy. There’s more surrounding that, but that’s the basics. Then, obviously, if there’s more insurance, it depends upon the person, the physical injury, the disability out of work or school or whatever they do on a day-to-day basis. Is it a permanent injury or not and how does it affect their daily activities as compared to what they did before the accident on a day-to-day basis? Those are all factors that make up or determine the value of a person’s personal injury case.
Obviously it takes some time to unfold to see all there is about the medical treatment, how long they will be out of work, and what they need into the future because of their injury to determine the value. After all of that unfolds a bit, then an attorney can answer those questions and factor in the insurance policy limit to determine a potential range value of that case. There’s no chart that you look at that tells you this broken bone equals this amount of money. It depends on the individual, their pain and suffering, the treatment that they had, how it’s impacted their life going forward, and whether or not it’s a permanent injury. There are so many factors that go into answering what the value of a person’s case is that I can’t give anybody a specific answer until we have more information as the case unfolds, at which time I’ll have a better answer to that question.
The law office of Weinstein, Chase, Messinger and Peters is composed of dedicated attorneys, who have years of experience dealing with personal injury cases throughout the Brooklyn, New York area. Contact them for your free initial consultation.
