What’s the average settlement for a car accident when you sustain a back and neck injury?
Back and neck injuries are often called whiplash injuries, that’s when you’re driving and get into a crash and your neck goes forward and backward and you feel the pain in your back, your neck, and in your lower back as well.
A lot of factors help affect this and there are a lot of defenses to these types of claims. The problem with whiplash is that a lot of time you don’t see the pain.
A whiplash injury can be diagnosed in a variety of ways, but the recommendation generally is “seek medical treatment” if someone is complaining of pain.
In the event you were relatively close to the accident and haven’t seen an urgent care provider, you should visit your healthcare insurance provider with your documentation if you have health insurance. If you do not have the necessary documentation, it’s difficult to prove how serious your whiplash injury is. You might struggle to get a few thousand dollars and if it’s just purely whiplash, all things equal.
Another factor to consider is property damage. Many times, insurance companies will say that the damage is only minor, such as a bumper, so it won’t have caused the injury. There are many times, however, when there is very little property damage but serious injuries, so low property damage is not a great defense for these companies. It can happen when two cars collide with each other, even a bump, its several thousand pounds of impact and it can cause a lot of pain.
So, cars at average settlements, ranging from thousands of dollars to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It depends on several factors.
- How are you prepping the case
- Are you going to a proper medical provider?
- Did you get the proper documentation?
- Do you have a diagnosis?
- Are you going to physical therapy, compactor, are you going to pain management if you need that
- Are you getting the proper radiographic studies
That’s why it’s important to talk to an attorney and see what type of things you can do to help bolster your case.
It’s very cynical to say but if you don’t have an attorney working with you on a car accident case, it’s much more likely that the insurance company will pay you less and yes that’s a kind of a bold statement to make but it’s the truth. Usually, when attorneys try to step in, they start trying to negotiate better and perhaps resolve the case and obviously it depends on who the attorney is. If the attorney is nobody that the insurance company has no record of then maybe they’re just kind of a wild card.
But if they have a history with these cases of the insurance industry because the insurance companies that share the information which is why it should be truthful then the attorney may be able to get a lot more money.
People often think that maybe ‘I shouldn’t hire an attorney because I have to pay them from the settlement but if we think the other way like you’re going to settle with an insurance company for like two thousand bucks which is very often in these whiplash cases when you may be entitled to much more or you know you can get an attorney that’s going to get you $30,000 or $50,000 and more for this whiplash case which you know they can go for that amount, not to say that they’re going to go for that all the time.
You know prep the right way they could go so to give an attorney a third or however much the contingency fee agreement is for that you’re goanna walk away with much more money, even after potentially the medical bills are spent.
Conclusion
The average settlement really depends on how it’s prepared, the property damage in certain situations because you have to prove the damage for whiplash, but you should be able to try at least proving your whiplash. It’s definitely worth talking to an attorney to see how you can maximize your value on a whiplash case.
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