Welcome to the ShTexaslawyer.com Blog

I get lots of calls from people who are trying to settle their own accident claims. Usually they call near the end of their negotiations with the insurance company. They are unhappy, frustrated and looking for advice as to how to wrap it up. At some point they all say something like, "I'm supposed to get three times my medical bills, right?"

When I started practicing personal injury law in 1991, you could still get a three times settlement with regularity. But, several waves of tort reform, the adoption of the Colossus adjusting program, the requirement of HICFA forms, and some just plain anti-lawyer and anti-lawsuit propaganda, later those days are gone.

I haven't looked at the statistics recently, but the last time I checked the average soft-tissue, non-DWI involved accident case was resolving for quite a bit under three times medical bills while in litigation. The odds are still rather high against petitioners at trial too. The last time I checked the "Blue Sheets" (a published list of all litigation settlements and judgments in Texas) some 63% of the people filing suits were getting zero to something less than their total claimed medical bills at trial.

I take these statistics with a grain of salt. I know that 90% or so of the claims made in Texas resolve without the filing of a lawsuit. The ones that get filed are usually ones where there is a problem with the facts of how the accident happened, a problem with the claimed injuries, the treatment or some other issue. If the problem cases are the ones most often filed, they are not a good statistical model of the non-problem cases being settled out of court. However, the insurance companies look at these statistics too. They know that the odds of trial are not good, and they have artificially inflated egos because of it. Unfortunately they take these statistics as a model of what should happen pre-trial.

What is the amount you can expect from a soft-tissue accident case? Everyone asks, and they get mad when I tell them there is no way to tell. Now, more than ever, each case is an individual matter. The facts of the accident, the amount of property damage, your age, your prior injuries, general health, mental health, living circumstances, job, treatment history, choice of doctors and use or non-use of health insurance can all affect the outcome. I can only guess where a case is going if I have been working it all the way through and we are several moves into the negotiations process. Sure, there is an average in there somewhere. Much like buying peaches, for example, if you weigh every one there is an average weight, but the best ones have that certain firmness, color, smell and ripeness that make a good peach. You have to look at each peach individually. The same is true with car wreck cases.

I wish I could just tell you what your case was worth and that you could just reach out and grab it. I can't.

What irks me more than that though is that often these callers have backed their case into a corner. With the adjuster entrenched in a position, hiring a lawyer that late in the game may not change anything. Often the caller has negotiated away all their bargaining room, and if they hire a lawyer there isn't much left for the lawyer to do except file suit. It is akin to them having tried to work out a deal with "the mob" in a movie, and now that everything is going wrong they are finally looking for help. Unlike the movies though, I can't put on a bullet proof vest and wade into battle with a pistol that never seems to run out of ammo.

If you came to this article because you have a case heading into negotiations, and you wanted to confirm what your case was worth, I'm sorry you aren't finding the answer you want. But, I encourage you to call for help before you get in so deep that only a movie hero could save you. If you are deep in negotiations and lost as to what to do, call a lawyer anyway. Maybe there is something you missed and the lawyer can still rescue you, even if he or she doesn't need a bullet proof vest to do it.