In this video, attorney Ted Spaulding details how to value a car accident claim in Georgia and the varying factors involved. He also explains how an experienced car accident lawyer can assist in your case.
What is my car accident claim worth? Keep watching this video to find out the components of the value of your car accident claim. Hi, I’m Ted Spaulding. I’m an Atlanta personal injury trial lawyer, and I’m the founder here at Spaulding Injury Law. So this is always the ultimate question, right, what is my claim potentially worth? And the short answer and the honest answer is in the beginning, during treatment and things of that nature, most people, lawyers, adjusters, yourself don’t know what the potential value is. Why? Because so much of it is geared around what are your injuries and how much treatment do you end up needing. That kind of fuels most of the value of your claim. And when you’re in the middle of it, or you’re at the very beginning, there’s potentially a long way to go to really know what your injuries are and what’s your longterm treatment is gonna look like. So that is kind of the bulk of it if you will. Let me give you a couple of other components that can help you longterm determine what the value is. So again, treatment is the biggest thing because that has to do with what your injuries are, how long you treat, therefore, what are your medical bills going to be and therefore also helps with the pain and suffering part as well. Obviously, jurors tend to think that you’ve gone through more pain, obviously, if you treat it longer than if you treat it shorter. So that is the biggest component as I mentioned earlier. What are your lost wages? Do you have future lost wages or lost earning capacity because you can’t work anymore? That’s a very big component. Some people have no lost wage claim. Others have a very large one. So that goes toward the value.
And then the kind of biggest difficult value determination factor is pain and suffering. We’re all guessing, adjusters, lawyers, everything else, what’s the pain and suffering worth. Every single case is different. You can have the same exact wreck with different injuries, that person gets better sooner or later than the next person so each case is uniquely different in this. What exactly did you go through? What exactly are your limitations, your loss of enjoyment of life? That’s a very tough thing. We’re all trying to determine what is a jury in the jurisdiction where we’re going to try this case, what would they tend to do with those sets of facts value-wise? And so we look at things like past verdicts, past cases that we’ve tried where jurors had similar information just to try to read tea leaves to say, “I think this is what a jury would probably do with this case.” Remember the only thing you have a legal right to in the state of Georgia is a trial to a jury of 6 or 12 of your peers to tell you what your case is ultimately worth.
So I hope this helps give you some more information to ultimately answer this very difficult question. If you have any more questions about this or any other topic, or if you have a potential claim you’d like to see if my firm can handle, respond to this video. Go to my website, spauldinginjurylaw.com, we have a contact form on there. Or give me a phone call. Two phone numbers for you, 770-744-0890 or 470-695-9950. Thanks for watching this video.
