It is difficult to explain what a good settlement offer may look like in your personal injury case without knowing more about your situation. Personal injury compensation is all relative, depending on the severity of your injuries and losses.
A settlement check of $100,000 can seem like a great outcome for some injury victims but a very poor outcome for others with lifelong catastrophic injuries. The one constant is that a good settlement offer needs to fully compensate you for how you suffered personally after your injury.
To know whether a settlement offer is actually good, you need to know more about personal injury law. Once you prove that someone else caused your injuries, they must pay you for the full extent of the damages they have caused you.
This obligation includes the financial losses you have suffered and the more subjective non-economic effects of your injuries. The two will combine in any settlement demand your personal injury attorney issues with your insurance claim.
The demand is only the jumping-off point for negotiations, however, as insurers rarely automatically agree to pay everything you request. This is why you need a New Hampshire personal injury attorney.
Your Settlement Needs to Pay for Your Actual Economic Losses
Economic damages cover the costs you incur from your injury and other financial effects. These damages cover the losses you sustained in the past and those you expect to endure.
Medical expenses will likely be a large part of your settlement. Your health insurance company needs to be reimbursed for any coverage it provides for you to receive care.
In addition, they will no longer have an obligation to cover your future medical costs, so you must get enough money now because you do not want to have to take from other areas of need to pay your bills in the future.
Your economic damages will also include the lost earnings from your job. Your injuries may have prevented you from working or caused you to miss time from work to attend doctor’s appointments.
Your injuries may prevent you from earning at your full capacity. For example, you may work in a physical job and cannot progress to a higher earnings level because you can no longer perform certain types of labor.
Your personal injury settlement offer should compensate you for actual lost income and any reduction in your earnings capacity.
Your personal injury attorney will know all the losses to include in your claim, including any other out-of-pocket expenses, such as transportation or home health care costs.
Personal Injury Settlements Also Cover Your Non-Economic Losses
Economic damages are hard enough to prove, but your claim gets even trickier when you factor in your more subjective non-economic damages. Non-economic damages include pain, suffering, and emotional distress. You can suffer these harms from the effects of your injuries and the accident itself.
The amount of your non-economic damages partially depends on the amount of your medical expenses because that is often how the insurance company calculates pain and suffering damages. They have formulas for non-economic damages, though these formulas do not always consider your unique circumstances.
Part of the challenge is that the insurance company might not acknowledge all the effects of your injuries. They want to act objectively in determining your non-economic damages but almost always skew the calculation in their favor.
Your personal injury lawyer can present a strong case for your individual non-economic damages.
Your Settlement Offer Must Fully Pay for All of Your Losses
Accordingly, a good settlement offer fully reflects all your harm. You can fully expect that the first settlement offer you receive will not. It may be so far from reality that you may think the offer was a misprint.
However, low initial settlement offers are part of the tactics the insurance company will use when they try to settle your claim for less.
If you do not have a personal injury attorney representing you in the legal process, you may not even know that the settlement offer is a bad one. Since you cannot trust an insurer’s calculations, the best way to know how much your claim is worth is to have the experience and knowledge of a personal injury lawyer on your side.
You Can Reject a Bad Settlement Offer and Even Litigate
If the settlement offer is low, you have every right to tell the insurance company you are not accepting it. They do not get to determine the amount that you agree to.
The only thing that they can do is make you a settlement offer. If they do not offer you enough money, your attorney can file a personal injury lawsuit. Then, your attorney can build a case to potentially present in court, where a jury might determine the compensation you deserve.
Most insurance companies want to avoid litigation, so they might make a fair offer before the case gets to trial.
Chances are that settlement offers will get better over time because the insurance company does want to resolve claims and prevent litigation when possible.
However, the insurance company has less motivation to raise their offer if you have no legal representation. Then, adjusters might believe there is a better chance you might accept less than you need.
Hiring a personal injury attorney is the best way to put pressure on the insurance company, but you should not wait to do it until the insurance company actually makes you a bad settlement offer.
Getting help from a personal injury lawyer early in your case is necessary to put you in the strongest possible legal position. It costs you nothing out of your own pocket because a personal injury attorney should accept your case on a contingency basis, meaning you only pay them if you win.