You were driving along on the freeway, and somebody rear-ended you, doing $5,000 in damage to your car and causing neck injury (resulting in $6,000 in medical bills). You lost wages for medical appointments, mainly x-rays and physical therapy. ($2,000). You come into my law office and want to sue. How much is my case worth, you ask?

In this example, I assume you didn’t break any bones; your neck injury was caused by whiplash as your head snapped forward and then back from the impact on the freeway. I also assume you had no permanent scarring and have entirely healed some three months later. Attorneys and insurance companies call these common accidents MIST cases (Minor Injury Soft Tissue).

First, you need some background before I tell you the answer. Few attorneys will tell you the “secret” formula for quick, ball-park, rough guidelines of the case’s value. First, they don’t want to reveal how the law works and the cold, hard dollar amounts assigned for the severe pain and discomfort you underwent, which is worth vast sums of money to you. Secondly, few attorneys admit to using such a formula because it is only a rough guideline (although so many use it for quick analysis). Third, many other factors can affect the answer, such as your age, where you live, and whether there was permanent damage or unresolved scarring.

Now, back to our case.

Medical Bills:                         $6,000

Automobile Damage:             $5,000

Lost Wages:                            $2,000

Under the quick guideline formula, the value is three times the medical specials plus the “hard” (provable) damages. Under the formula, your case is worth $25,000, calculated as (Medical x 3) + (Car + Wages), or in figures ($18,000 + $7,000). Fair? Not particularly. But it’s reasonably accurate for a rough estimate (at least in Northern California).

Now, if permanent scarring, broken bones, or other facts are involved, the attorney (or at least I used to and the attorneys I knew) would increase the “three times medicals” up to “five times medicals” for such circumstances.

Now, let’s assume you were speeding on a surface street in your hometown while another car ran a stop sign. The police report claims the accident was 75% the other driver’s fault and 25% your fault for speeding. We will use the same figures as above. Your $25,000 case is reduced by one-quarter ($25,000 x 75%), so your case is now worth $18,750. At least two major insurance companies (and I won’t identify them) have established a corporate policy of making attorneys try every MIST (Minor Injury Soft Tissue) case. They will only pay after a jury trial. As an attorney, I may have accepted ten personal injury cases at a time, expecting to settle nine and only having to try one. There wasn’t enough money in cases under $50,000 to $100,0000 to make it worth going to trial over every case. As a result, many attorneys will not accept MIST cases against those insurance carriers. The American Bar Association has held nationwide conferences about this issue, but most attorneys across America will not take such cases against those specific insurance companies.

The formula clause breaks down when evaluating significant cases. When I was practicing law, I subscribed to a journal called Jury Verdict Weekly, which reported in detail the facts of such cases decided that week, the legal theories presented, the comparative negligence (how much the plaintiff was at fault), unusual facts about the parties or injuries involved, and the amount the jury awarded. From this analysis, I could form a reasonable estimate of a case’s value. Also, some attorneys are better than others in court, and high-powered attorneys can achieve much higher results than “average” attorneys. I also knew juries in San Francisco would award more for a case than that same case in Petaluma, a town an hour north of San Francisco and more rural in character. Some states “cap” medical specials and will not allow juries to award over a specified amount, so you must check your state laws.

You are not able to “ballpark” how much your case might be worth or at least understand how attorneys determine the value of a personal injury case.