What Happens When You’re Offered a Settlement for Your Personal Injury?

When you’ve been hurt in a motor vehicle accident or other incident caused by someone else’s irresponsible actions, you often have the option to file a personal injury lawsuit to require the person who caused your injuries to compensate you for the harm they’ve caused. Most of these lawsuits are filed against the person or company responsible, such as the driver of the car that hit you or the hospital where you suffered due to medical malpractice. However, the claims are generally handled by insurance companies.

Those insurance companies settle lawsuits out of court more often than they put their defense teams to work in court. But that doesn’t mean the lawyers aren’t working. They are involved in every facet of the process of settling personal injury lawsuits.

If you’re filing a personal injury claim or you’ve received an offer to settle your claim, there are some critical facts you need to understand before you sign papers or accept anything. A settlement can be highly beneficial, or it can be a trap. Understanding how the process works and the catch behind every offer will help you make choices that are right for your situation.

Know the Value of Your Claim

Experienced injury attorneys know how to negotiate settlements that are an excellent deal for their clients. But some settlements are mediocre. And other settlements put accident victims at a tremendous disadvantage. How can you tell the difference? You need to know the value of your claim. 

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to assessing the value of a personal injury claim. The assessment involves consideration of a wide array of issues, and many of those issues involve judgment of intangible factors based on subtle distinctions. It is both an art and a science. So, it’s a lot more than simply plugging a few facts into a computer program and waiting for AI to spit out an answer.

Providing Certainty

A settlement provides certainty for both the plaintiff (the injured person seeking compensation) and the defendant (the person responsible and their insurance company). That is part of the value to both parties, and it needs to be factored into consideration.

Looking Out for Future Needs

Injuries from situations such as truck accidents, animal attacks, exposure to toxins, and negligence in the hospital affect more than one moment in time. They impact your entire life going forward from the moment of injury. The effects may decrease substantially over time. But many times they do not. The pain, disabilities, and emotional anguish linger, changing the quality of your life and affecting how you live each day of your future.

The amount you receive from your personal injury claim should include appropriate amounts to account for the future impact of your injuries and to provide for the additional needs you will have in the future as a result. For instance, even if your injuries appear to fully heal at some point, you will need extensive medical examinations regularly in the future to detect whether a condition has returned or requires special care. If your injuries are continuing to heal or leave you with lingering effects, you will need additional medical care for the remainder of your life. Your settlement must provide adequate resources to pay for the cost of that care.

In addition, your settlement needs to be sufficient to offset not only the anguish you’ve experienced in the past, but all the emotional and physical pain you will experience in the days to come. You might have had a bucket list of adventures you’ve been saving up to enjoy, but now you cannot risk trying a single one for fear of causing further injuries to your spine. Or you start to realize that people are looking at you differently because of scars from your burn injuries, and you stop participating in activities you once looked forward to, such as going out to try new restaurants.  

Many conditions caused by injuries will grow worse over time. Damage to your ears may require only minor adjustments to the volume of your TV now, but in the future, you could lose the ability to hear what loved ones are saying and be left out of conversations everywhere you go.

The injuries can impact your future in ways that may be difficult to imagine now. Years later, the consequences of severe bone fractures may prevent you from playing with grandchildren who at this point haven’t even been born yet. You can’t anticipate the details of everything that will happen in your future, but experienced legal analysts can help you anticipate enough so that you can gain the resources you need to be fully prepared.

Providing Justice for Your Losses

The value of your personal injury claim includes economic losses you have already experienced and those that affect you currently. This includes your expenses for hospital care, doctor visits, and special equipment needed to accommodate your condition. It also includes amounts to make up for income lost while you are unable to work and the cost of caregivers or assistance you’ve needed.

Your settlement should cover these costs, but it also needs to provide fair compensation for the other impacts of your injuries. Your pain, your trauma, your anguish—justice demands that you receive fair retribution for all the agony you’ve experienced because of someone else’s irresponsible conduct. In a perfect world, the person who caused your injuries would be required to undo the damage they’ve done. There is no way to erase the harm, unfortunately, but an award of substantial compensation can provide a sense of justice that allows you to achieve closure and to move forward with your life.

Putting a Price Tag on Aspects of Your Life That are Priceless

The value of your personal injury claim includes amounts for factors that have no set value. How do you put a price on the difference between waking up fresh and dragging yourself from the bed in pain and exhausted due to yet another night of PTSD? Attorneys who are knowledgeable and dedicated can establish an accepted value for these intangible factors based on an analysis of legal precedent and the unique issues that come into play in the particular case.

Timing is Crucial

You don’t want to accept a settlement that is worth far less than the value of your claim if you were to take the case to court. And the timing of the settlement offer usually plays a big role in the value of the settlement.

A settlement offer is an invitation to negotiate. In a classic negotiation between two experienced merchants, a buyer will make a really low offer, and the seller will laugh and counter the offer with a much higher price.

When an insurance company offers an amount to settle a personal injury claim, they are making that initial, crazy low value offer. They hope you won’t notice how low it is and will accept it just to make things easy. After all, we’ve all been taught that “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

It is important to understand that the bird-in-hand comparison is not accurate. You’d need to compare a bird in the hand to 100 birds in a cage. Yes, it will take some effort to catch those birds, and you may never quite put your hands on all of them, but you’re likely to get far more than two of them if you’re patient and you get help from an experienced ally.

So, in most cases, it makes sense to negotiate over time to drive the settlement offer up. Insurance companies are more likely to offer a fair settlement amount when they know you are working with an attorney who is prepared to take your case to court and persuade the judge of the value of your claim. But even then, it takes time for them to reluctantly admit that they’re going to need to provide fair compensation. They will keep hoping you’ll settle for less.

Accepting a Settlement is Final

It is vitally important to understand that once you agree to settle your claim, you are locked in. You cannot go back and request more if it turns out that your injuries never heal or that you later become permanently disabled because your condition has progressed. It is important to evaluate all the factors at issue in your case and make a fully informed decision before you sign or accept anything.

The Experienced Injury Attorneys at Searcy Denney Tallahassee Can Help Negotiate and Evaluate Settlement Offers

Most personal injury cases settle out of court, but they don’t all settle well. At Searcy Denney Tallahassee, we have decades of experience proving the value of our clients’ claims in court, and we are always laying the groundwork to succeed in litigation if necessary. That often prompts insurance companies to make fair settlement offers so they can avoid the expense of a trial. From our perspective, a fair settlement is beneficial for the client as well because it can enable them to receive compensation much more quickly.

But every situation is different. We invite you to discuss the possibilities in your situation so you can learn how to get the most from a settlement or verdict in your personal injury case. To schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with a knowledgeable personal injury lawyer on our team, call us at 888-549-7011 or contact us online now.