How Lawyers Calculate Your Car Accident Value.

Hello, my name is Brandon Richie. I'm a personal injury attorney. I work at a law firm called Richie Rayerson Law. And all I do for my job is I just help people up in a car accident. I help them start claims. I help them get claims settled. I answer their questions, negotiate the medical bills. Ultimately, I do everything to deal with car accidents and getting people, you know, get resolution for their car accident. Now I get asked a lot, how much is my car accident worth? You hear on these ads on Facebook or on TV, get a million dollars, people holding big checks. I got $250,000 for my car accident. How do we come up with those numbers? How do you come up with a value of what a car accident is worth? Now, every accident is different. I'm going to tell you that right now. And there are so many variables on what makes a car accident worth a certain amount of money. Now I'm pretty good now at guessing. You know, once I have all the medical bills, once I know the insurance company, once I know the duration of treatment, once I know severity of like property damage, I can guess pretty close. And just because I've done so many of these, I've done thousands of these things. You know, between my office, we've done, you know, almost $200 million worth of settlements. And so obviously we've done a lot of these, but even us, like there are so many variables that we have to kind of look at every single case individually. But I want to break it down, kind of the few things on how, you know, what makes determine what a case is worth and ultimately kind of an expectation of what you can get from your accident. Despite what you see on social media, despite what you see on TV, you know, I settle cases all day long for $2,000, $4,000, $10,000. And that's how much our client gets in their pocket. I also settle much bigger cases, but it all just depends on the severity of the case. What that means is, if you get in an accident and it's a fender bender and it's not too big a deal, and yeah, you go to the hospital once, you get checked out, that's not worth a million dollars. It's not even worth $100,000. It's not even worth $50 or $10,000. That's going to be, you know, sometimes $500, sometimes $1,000. You know, not very much money in your pocket. Now, compare that to a really severe case. You know, you're driving through, you get T-boned. Your car gets ripped in half, flipped over. You know, you break your shoulder. You have broken ribs. Your eyes are beaten up. You're in the hospital for five days. You know, you missed three months of work. Now we're talking big case. That's a whole different situation, whole different ball game, actually. Now that's a big case. And once again, even in that case, though, the value of that claim is going to depend on what's the total of the medical bills. Were you better after the hospital or did you go and need a bunch of treatment? Did you go to the physical therapist for three months? How much money do you actually miss from work? And do you get paid $18 an hour? Are you somebody who makes $100,000 a year? You know, that's a big difference. That helps determine the value of the claim as well. But ultimately, let's break this down. One of the first things to value is the expense of the medical treatment. Pretty obvious. If somebody has $500 worth of medical bills and somebody has $5,000 worth of medical bills and somebody has $50,000 worth of medical bills, you can assume that the $50,000 claim is going to be worth drastically more than the person who has $500. That's just how it works. Duration of treatment. Somebody who needs to go to the doctor one time. They went one day to the doctor. That's going to be worth drastically less than somebody who hurt real bad. They had to go to the chiropractor for three months. Then they had to get MRIs. They had to, you know, they have herniated discs. They ended up going to physical therapy for another six months. Ultimately, they need a surgery around their shoulder. You know, so that's another three months of physical therapy. The duration of treatment. How long it takes you to go from where I was, hurting, hurting, hurting, back to where I was again. If it's a longer duration of treatment, that's going to make your claim worth higher amounts of money. Pretty simple. Property damage. Now this doesn't and should not be a deciding factor in how much your claim is worth. But frankly, it kind of is. You know, if you're in a car accident, little scratches on your car, little dents on your car. It's so much harder for me to like litigate and go all, you know, say that this is a huge, huge accident versus somebody who gets T-boned. Their whole door's busted in and the car, the trunk doesn't work and the windshield cracks. So honestly, when we look at a case and we know it's going to be litigated and we have to go to court, it's so much easier if we have pictures of this car that's been, you know, destroyed. Because that helps the jury understand, hey look, this person, they went through heck. This car accident's huge. Now that's not to say that like a little fender bender with minor scratches, minor, you know, we take those to court too. But it's definitely more of a fight. You know, it's harder. Now types of injuries. That also makes a big difference. You have a bruise. That's a bad, that's bad. Bruises, you know, they hurt. But after two weeks, bruise is typically gone. Broken bone, that's a different story. You know, six to eight weeks, sometimes 12 weeks. Now, what if you have to have a surgery that really affects your life? You know, you blow out your ACL because your knee was twisted all weird in the car accident. Or shoulders, shoulders are very common because your seatbelt is typically on this side. Your seatbelt's going across here. Wreck, you can mess up your shoulder pretty bad. Now, shoulder surgeries take a long time and most people don't heal fully from those. That's a huge value driver. Now, I don't think you want to break your shoulder in a car accident, but if you did, you know, that's a value of a case. Ultimately, what we want to get at is you want to look at every single thing relating to your car accident. Wage loss, how it affected your family, what you missed because of this, how much your medical bills are, how bad the accident was, duration of injury, all these things, right? And that's why it's so important to have an attorney on your side who deals with this every single day. You know, we have computer software that can help generate all these documents, gather all this information, put it in this huge packet. And we can come up with a valuation to send to the insurance company, but that's only half the battle. The bigger battle is you have an attorney who knows how to talk to the insurance companies, negotiate with them, get the highest value you can for these claims, because that's what it really comes down to is, yeah, they're going to give you a number, but then I get on the phone with them or call them or whatever it takes. You know, sometimes 10, 12, sometimes you have to mediate, sometimes you have to arbitrate, sometimes you have to litigate. There's so many things that an attorney can do to help drive that value of your claim up. Ultimately, if you're in a car accident, always a good idea to talk to a personal injury attorney. And most of them are pretty low pressure. Most of them are actually really good people. Sit down. If it makes sense, sure, get an attorney. It almost always does, just because we can get the claim up higher for you, makes your life easier. But yeah, they'll be candid with you. If it makes sense to get an attorney, strongly recommend it. Once again, my name is Brandon Ricci. I'm with Ricci Raterson Law. Just want to give you some examples of what makes a car accident claim have value. If you ever want to help from us, happy to answer your question. Washington, Idaho, Oregon, kind of serve the whole area. We have multiple attorneys, multiple paralegals here to answer your questions. We speak Spanish, all kinds of different things. They'll help you understand the true value of your auto accident claim. Thank you so much. Love answering you guys' questions.