Many law firms put settlement calculators on their websites in an attempt to lure prospective clients into retaining them. It’s a great marketing tool, but absolutely useless in trying to determine that true value of your case.
So, how do settlement calculators work? If you are an insurance company or a big advertising law firm with thousands of cases, you can calculate the average value of cases by looking at similar case results across the jurisdiction and feel pretty comfortable that “on average” your cases will return a verdict or a settlement within a certain window. Settlement calculators that purport to do this are really just giving you a number with massive disclaimers. Here’s why:
Say you have 10 motor vehicle accidents with similar injuries going to trial in the 3rd quarter of the year. You can look at the verdicts returned over the past few years in the same jurisdiction and come up with an average. You know that most of your 10 cases will probably be in line with that average. You may have one or two that you do really well on, and one or two that you get killed on, but they will balance out and you’ll probably be in the average range across all cases.
Do You Want to be Average?
If you are a Plaintiff heading into a personal injury case, and you want to be compensated for the harms and losses you have sustained in an accident, you have to ask yourself: is my case an average case? Is an average settlement OK with me?
The reality is: as an individual Plaintiff, you don’t have the same luxury of rolling the dice to get the average. Your case isn’t average. You most likely won’t get an “average” result. You won’t have an “average” jury. You will have your jury and you will get your verdict.
Your Case, Your Jury, Your Verdict
Accidents and injuries can be identical. People are not. Plaintiffs are not. Juries are not. There are so many factors that play into the value of a personal injury case that using some cookie-cutter formula to value a case is not how you want to have your lawyer evaluate your case.
Let’s say you have a rear-end motor vehicle accident and suffer a neck injury that results in you being forced to have a neck surgery. You miss 6 weeks of work and have a good recovery. What makes your case different from someone else with the same loss on paper? Here are just a few things to consider:
- Jurisdiction: some jurisdictions are more conservative than others and traditionally return lower verdicts. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t get a good verdict in a conservative jurisdiction. It is simply one factor.
- Plaintiffs: do you come across as humble and likeable or more angry and bitter? Is a jury going to be inclined to believe you or think you are just whining? You may have every right to be angry and bitter, but juries don’t all find this to be a desirable trait. A lot of this deals with personality traits, but even if you are angry and bitter, an experienced trial lawyer can help you learn how to testify so as to highlight your better personal qualities and help you control your more negative ones.
- Defendants: is the person that injured you a likeable person? Did the tell you they were sorry? Did they accept responsibility or are they making excuses. Are they a “bad actor”, meaning can your lawyer make the jury dislike them as a result of their behavior? If so, juries typically don’t like bad actors. They are more inclined to give you a good verdict if they dislike the defendant than if they simply like you. In other words, your likeability may be a plus, but it’s not nearly as important as the defendant’s dis-likeablity. (Yeah, I just made that word up, but it gets the point across).
- The Moon’s Cycle: On Any Given Sunday any football team can beat any other football team. I’m throwing this in there to make the point that so much happens during a trial, that it’s simply impossible to reliably predict what a jury will end up doing. Did a witness say something surprising? Did the judge make an unexpected ruling on evidence? Did you get a stubborn juror? Did you get a strong advocate for a jury? Did the defense attorney say something to make the jury angry? The list goes on. My point: you may as well base a prediction of how your case will turn out at trial on the lunar cycle as use a settlement calculator. They have the same accuracy.
The Verdict on Settlement Calculators
We, as personal injury lawyers must evaluate cases based upon what we think a jury might do. This involves a lot of reliance on other jury verdicts around the state and country, on our own professional experience, and “round tabling” cases with other lawyers, where we give our fact patterns to others personal injury attorneys (both within our firm and without). At the end of the day, it is and should be our gut that tells us how a case will do at trial. In order to have that gut feeling, more than just being an experienced personal injury lawyer, we must really know and understand the people we represent. We must spend time with them. We must know their personalities and how they react. Knowing our clients is the absolute best way to both evaluate their cases and present the best cases possible at trial. You can’t do that by punching numbers into a formula.
