How Much is a Car Accident Claim Worth?

How much is a car accident claim worth? It really depends on how you adjust your lens.

According to Jury Verdict Research, the median jury award for plaintiffs’ verdicts in 2010 for vehicular accidents was only $19,806. That’s not much. Yet the average award in a vehicle crash case is $181,197. ISO, an insurance risk information service, reports that about 5% percent of bodily injury claims – including cases that were settled out-of-court – in 2010 were for more than $100,000, while about 2% reached $300,000.

What does this tell us? For those of you who went to some fancy liberal arts college – communist! – that did not require statistics, it underscores the wild difference than can exist between the average and the median. It also shows how insurance companies can distort data. Trust me, when their lobbyists storm Annapolis, they are throwing out average verdicts, not median verdicts, and ignoring many of those high end average verdicts.

We have put on our website a lot of data that provides average and median verdict and settlement data for specific types of personal injury cases and specific types of injuries. You need to take this data with more than a pinch of salt. The truth is – trite as it may be – that there are so many intangible variables at play in determining the true worth of a particular person’s injury case. So, average settlement and verdict statistics are of limited use in determining the value of your case.