Insurers give their closest attention to 2 factors, when working to determine the value of a given claimant’s personal injury. Those factors are the type and extent of the injury. The degree of an injury’s seriousness represents its extent.

Insurance companies look at the amount of money a claimant has spent on having injuries assessed and treated.

The assessment allows for identification of the injury’s type. Insurers link different types to different levels of pain. Separations, dislocations, torn ligaments, torn cartilage and injured vertebrae are known to produce a great deal of pain. Claimants that hope to convince an insurance company that their pains have come from a different type of damage need to produce convincing evidence. That is why personal injury lawyers in Fontana encourage each of their clients to keep a journal or a diary.

Proving any one injury’s severity requires an understanding of how to obtain the most convincing evidence.

When soft tissue has been damaged, the only measure of the injury’s severity comes from a description of the resulting pain. Damage to muscles and connective tissues (ligaments and tendons) produces any of the various soft tissue injuries.

Hard injuries have more convincing evidence. Wounds, broken bones, head injuries, and damage to tissues in the neck or back qualify as “hard,” and usually get indentified with relative ease. The existence on a victim’s body of a hard injury increases the value of the victim’s case, regardless of all the associated conditions.

Not all damage to the head can be noted by an initial examination of an accident victim. Victims can highlight the possible existence of such a problem by mentioning any period of disorientation that developed within minutes of the injury-causing collision.

How does a determination by the insurance company translate the existence of good evidence into a noteworthy value for any given case?

Insurers’ approach to that challenge relies on utilization of a multiplier. The size of that multiplier normally varies between 1.5 and 5, although it can go as high as 10. When a claimant’s medical problem gets classified as “serious,” then the insurance company uses a larger multiplier.

The insurance company uses a formula that allows calculation of a product. That product gets calculated by using the multiplier as one factor in a multiplication step. The other factor is the sum for all of a given claimant’s medical bills.

Once that product has been obtained, it gets added to the damage created by a loss of property. The resulting sum provides the insurance company with the estimated value for a particular case. The company’s adjuster might propose that estimate, when he or she must introduce some figure in an initial bid, made in response to the demand letter.