How Much Money Can I Get for My Car Accident Injuries? mdautoaccident

How Much Money Will I Get For My Car Accident?

If you have come to this page, you want to know how much money your Maryland car accident case is worth. Heck, the title even baits you as if there is an answer. But if you are looking for a formula to give you a clear cut answer, you are not going to find it here. Or anywhere. Valuing Maryland car accidents is going to vary dramatically with the nuances of each individual case. Every accident, every injury, and every set of medical records are different. But our goal here is to give you some insight into the process of putting a dollar value on accident cases to give you a greater understanding of the process and perhaps the value of your case.

It is also important to understand that in Maryland accident cases, the determination of settlement value of the case tends to increase once suit has been filed. More than 90% of the time, the value of a Maryland injury case will increase from the time before suit is filed to the time of (or day before) trial. Our accident lawyers have had cases where the pretrial offer was more than 20 times the pre-suit offer. See our accident attorneys’ testimonials for a few examples. Sometimes, even in good cases, no offer is made.

How the Insurance Companies Determine Value

Typically, most of the insurance companies our auto lawyers deal with in Maryland cases use computer software to determine the value of car, truck, and motorcycle accident cases. Most use a computer system called Colossus, or its progeny, which is reportedly used by more than 50 percent of the nation’s claims insurance adjusters. The insurance claim adjuster inputs the data from your medical records and the amount of your lost wages. Colossus considers, in a rough way, the severity of the accident and where the accident occurred (or where a lawsuit could be brought). Colossus will assign more money to a claim in a jurisdiction that is favorable for car accident victims, such as Baltimore City or Prince George’s County, than it would in jurisdictions like Garrett County, Wicomico County, or Montgomery County where juries tend to be far more conservative.

Certainly, there is also great consideration – probably way too much consideration – of how serious the accident was in terms of property damage. There are two huge problems with this analysis. First, our accident lawyers have seen death cases in otherwise minor accidents, and minor injuries in car accidents where there is a great deal of property damage. Second, the Colossus measurement, which includes “How much did the car cost to fix or was it totaled?” is a completely misleading measure of the severity of a car accident.

Another fact our accident lawyers believe is critical to the Colossus value analysis is whether your lawyer has a history of successfully taking trials to verdict in Maryland. Many “car accident lawyers” are really car accident settlement lawyers. Both the computer and the insurance adjuster know which lawyers just settle their cases regardless of the offer because they want to avoid a trial. Accordingly, the quality and history of your Maryland accident attorney impacts how much money you recover in your case, even if you settle your case without trial.

Colossus takes all of this this information (you can read more about Colossus here) and generates a range of settlement values for that accident case. While Colossus and similar programs do have some benefits, the problem is obvious: it is a computer. No computer can look in a person’s eye and gauge the injury victim’s sincerity. How much is it worth to not be able to play baseball in the yard because you are in pain every time you try to do anything more than walk slowly? Can a computer answer these types of questions? Of course they cannot. This is why we have juries.

Juries are not computers. In fact, they are the opposite. A jury may not award an accident victim money based on the medical mumbo jumbo of an ankle fracture. But it will award damages because Mom used to be a shopaholic for her three kids at Christmas time, but now cannot get off a bench at the mall because her ankle hurts too much from walking from toy store to toy store. A computer cannot understand this kind of impact and never will. The very purpose of a jury in our legal system is to take these types of intangibles into consideration in order to render a fair verdict. This is why we have lawyers and, more importantly, why we have juries.

Our Maryland accident law firm handles, among other things, serious injury car accidents involving such injuries as broken or fractured legs, both in Maryland and throughout the country. If you or a loved one has suffered a serious leg injury as the result of the negligence of someone else, call our lawyers at 800-553-8082 or click here for a free Internet consultation.