When people get into a car accident, they tend to only worry about suffering from extreme physical health problems such as spinal cord or traumatic brain injuries. However, even if a car accident victim doesn't suffer from one of those, there are many things to worry about after a crash.
Soft tissue injuries may not be deadly, but they can cause several problems in the long run. They may even make the victim unable to do many things, such as work or even get out of bed. Recovering from soft tissue injuries can be expensive, so the best thing that victims can do after suffering from one is to file a car accident claim against the negligent driver who caused everything.
Many victims avoid filing a personal injury lawsuit due to how stressful and long the whole legal process can be, but they should always do it. The money they can get for a car accident settlement is worth it, and they will need it to pay for the medical treatment to recover from their injuries and the other expenses the accident caused.
Hiring the right personal injury attorney to handle the claim will make the whole process much easier for the victim. Schuerger Shunnarah Trial Attorneys works with a few of the best lawyers people can find in Texas.
What makes them so good? Well, apart from their expertise, many of them are former insurance company lawyers, so they know the strategies these companies will use and can use that knowledge against their former employers. Victims of a car accident should dive into this page to know the average settlement amount they can get for their soft tissue injuries after a crash and more information about the legal process.
What Are Soft Tissue Injuries?
Soft tissue injuries, as their name suggests, refer to any damage victims get to their body's soft tissues. That includes most of their connective tissues, such as their ligaments, tendons, and even their muscles. People can get these injuries for many reasons, but what causes them, in this case, is the sudden impact on their bodies after the car accident.
Other reasons include overuse of those connective tissues, repetitive motion, or strain. Many people suffer soft tissue injuries all the time, but they are not always as severe as they can be after a car accident or any other severe incident. A few examples of these injuries are strains, contusions, sprains, or tendonitis.
What makes soft tissue injuries severe and a huge problem after a car accident is their symptoms. Victims can develop extreme pain, swelling, and increased difficulty in performing their everyday activities. Even if the victim only got minor car accident injuries, those problems can decrease their range of motion.
There are many ways to treat soft tissue injuries, so everything depends on the specific problem the victim is going through. The medical treatment for them often includes ice and physical therapy, the RICE method, pain management medication, or even surgery if the victim suffered from severe injuries. All the expenses related to the treatment are added to the final car accident settlement amount.
That's what makes it so important for personal injury lawyers to check the victim's medical bills and records, as that tells them how much money they need to fully recover all the expenses they need to address. Medical bills are what make car accident settlements as expensive as they often are.
How Much Can a Car Accident Settlement Be?
There's no maximum amount of money people can ask for in a car accident settlement, so everything depends on how expensive the medical treatment is and other economic and non-economic factors. The most expensive personal injury lawsuit in Texas involved billions of dollars.
However, there's not a minimum amount of money either, so the final car accident settlement can be low if the victim fails to prove how much money they need for everything. That's the reason victims need an experienced lawyer to file their car accident claim since even if they win the case, they need to make sure that the win gets them enough money to cover all the expenses that came with the accident.
The same happens if the victim goes through a motor vehicle accident or any other type of personal injury case. Many people avoid taking the risk of losing the trial, so they prefer to agree on the settlement they are willing to take with the insurance company and the liable party. However, if victims were to negotiate with the insurance company, they should always do it with their personal injury attorney there.
Otherwise, the insurance company will do everything it can to confuse the victim and make them agree to an unfair settlement. Why do these companies do this? Because they will pay for a part of the final settlement, so they often want to lose the least money possible.
What Is the Average Settlement for Soft Tissue Injuries After Car Accidents in Texas?
Calculating an average car accident settlement is difficult due to all the factors lawyers need to take into account when taking these cases. Not all soft tissue injuries are the same, so the money people will need to cover the medical treatment for them always changes.
Besides that, victims filing a Texas car accident claim will need money for more things apart from physical therapy and overall medical treatment. They need to consider their lost wages, non-economic damages, property damage, and the list goes on. However, people can know how much money can soft tissue injuries add to the total amount they can receive from car accident settlements.
The range is wide, but these injuries could add from $2,000 to $300,000 to the final amount victims receive from the personal injury claim. People can recover from a whiplash injury with $2,500 or get to $10,000 if it's a more severe problem.
Ankle sprains are often more expensive, so victims may need from $15,000 to $20,000 to pay for the medical treatment. Things get worse when dealing with more severe problems, such as a herniated disc injury, as they often require up to $350,000.
What Other Injuries Can Car Accidents Cause?
As mentioned before, even if someone suffers from a soft tissue injury, that's not the only thing they should look for compensation for in a Texas auto accident settlement. It's odd to see victims in car accident cases only suffering from a soft tissue injury and no other physical health issues.
When someone gets into a severe car accident case, they can even suffer from traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, partial disability, or dismemberment. These are a few of the other physical health problems people can get compensation for in a Texas auto accident settlement:
Neck and back injuries
Broken bones
Head injuries
Whiplash
Burns
Lacerations
Factors That Can Make Settlements in Car Accidents Higher
After a personal injury lawyer determines the money their client can ask for to recover from a soft tissue injury they should consider other factors that could make the compensation higher. The main goal of each lawyer filing a soft tissue injury is to get their clients the maximum amount of money they can.
Here are a few of the main factors lawyers consider when filing car accident claims:
Pain and Suffering
When a lawyer talks about pain and suffering, they are not talking about two different concepts but rather a single legal term that includes all the physical pain the victim went through after a soft tissue injury or any other personal injury. Emotional pain doesn't have a real-life value, as it's not something with a physical form. Hence, lawyers and judges have different legal methods to set a specific amount of money to it for a soft tissue injury claim.
The first one is to give pain a daily specific value and charge that value daily for the number of days the victim suffers from those injuries. That way, they will, technically, get compensation for all the pain the car accident injury caused them.
They can also give pain a number between two and five and multiply it by the total amount of money the other non-economic damages get in the final soft tissue injury settlement. That, of course, will make the at-fault driver pay much more money than they had to in the first place. However, victims would need to prove that the accident was what caused that pain and suffering.
Lost Wages
When the victim's injuries are too severe and require surgery or other thorough recovery processes, they won't be able to work or earn money as they should. Even if they didn't have that money in the first place, they would have gotten it if they hadn't been part of an auto accident. Therefore, they can get compensation for that.
Soft tissue injury claims often include lost wages compensation because of how victims lose part of their mobility after an auto accident.
Medical Bills
One of the most straightforward ways to get to the exact amount of money people would get for an auto accident is not to check the average settlement but rather the medical bills for the accident. Lawyers would only need to show those bills as evidence of how much money the victim had to pay to recover from their serious injuries.
Property Damage
If the victim's car gets damaged in an auto accident, they can ask for financial compensation to pay for that. Those damages count as property damage, and they include all the physical properties that were damaged or destroyed after the crash.
Other Non-Economic Damages
"Pain and suffering" is not the only non-economic damage people have to take into account after an auto accident. Some states don't use that term to refer to emotional suffering but rather others like "emotional distress" and other mental health issues that also count as non-economic factors. One of the most common ones is post-traumatic stress disorder, which victims often develop after an auto accident.
What to Look for in a Personal Injury Lawyer
Whether a victim suffers from a neck and back injury or a tissue one, the lawyers who handle personal injury cases specialize in them. However, not all the lawyers someone finds online will be enough for the job. All lawyers are different, but clients should always look for specific features they should share.
The first of them is that they focus on personal injury law. Car accident attorneys know everything about the law and how it works, but someone who specializes in these cases will always know how to deal with them much better. That leads to another essential perk, and it's looking for someone with years of experience in this field.
Clients also need someone who has enough time to work on their cases. If a lawyer is on three cases at the same time, they won't pay enough attention to any of the three. Most law firms offer free case evaluations, so no one should settle for less.
What Can a Personal Injury Lawyer Do for Car Accident Victims?
People think lawyers only take care of trials, but the truth is that they can do much more than that. They can give information on the average settlement for shoulder injury car accident Texas. If a client knows what an attorney offers, they can optimize the tasks they want them to work on. These are the main things personal injury attorneys can do for their victims:
Handle Paperwork
One of the most stressful parts of going through any kind of legal process is all the paperwork needed for the case. Making a single mistake in any of them can bring the whole strategy down, and that would mean losing the compensation the victim needs for their medical treatment.
Lawyers know all the forms and files they need to file for each case, and they can take care of all of them for their clients. That way, they can focus on other aspects of the legal process.
Collect Evidence
Evidence is a key part of personal injury lawsuits, as they are what determines if someone loses or wins a case. If a victim claims that the other party caused the accident, they need something that proves that without any reasonable doubt.
The catch of that is that it's not enough for the victim to receive the compensation they need for the case. They also need to prove that the accident caused all the damage they say they are suffering from and that they need that money to cover it. There are many evidence pieces that work in a personal injury claim, such as photos, videos, or even witnesses.
Lawyers know all the evidence they can use in a case, and they know where to find it. However, victims can help them do this if they want.
Undergo Negotiations
Negotiating with the insurance company and the at-fault driver is difficult, even if the victim sets apart the fact that they may try to give them an unfair settlement. Personal injury lawyers have been through this process hundreds of times, so they know how to negotiate, what they should be willing to take, and their non-negotiables for the case.
Make the Legal Process Less Stressful
There are many other ways to make legal processes for the victim easier than just taking care of paperwork for them. Lawyers should always try to explain every part of the case and what they are doing to their clients, reassure them, and give them hope when they think everything's lost.
Go to Trial
Unlike what most people think, not all personal injury claims end on a trial. Most of them don't get to one, as people prefer to negotiate with the other party to get to a fast settlement. Nonetheless, if they were to get into a trial, attorneys will fight relentlessly for their client's compensation.
Why Should People Trust Schuerger Shunnarah Trial Attorneys for Their Trial?
Schuerger Shunnarah Trial Attorneys is the best option for a car accident victim looking for an experienced personal injury attorney. The people working for this company have years of experience in this field, but their main perk is that they are former insurance company lawyers. It's not a secret that these companies always try all kinds of tricks or strategies to confuse the victim and make them lose the case. They can share the average brain injury settlement value Texas.
Now that these lawyers switched sides, they know what the insurance company in their case will do and can build a strategy to counter theirs. Being former insurance company lawyers is a big feature, but that's not the only thing these workers can do.
It only takes going to its website to see all the results they have gotten over time. Telling this law firm how an accident went won't cost the victim anything, as it offers free case consultations to its clients.
Other Types of Personal Injury Cases
Soft tissue injuries and car accidents are not the only types of personal injury cases lawyers handle in Texas. The process to file a lawsuit when someone gets neck and back injuries, for example, is the same, but how they get those injuries can change. Here are a few examples of these cases:
Premises liability
Workplace accidents
Medical malpractice
Motorcycle accidents
How Long Do Personal Injury Lawsuits Take?
Everything depends on how severe the case is, how much time both parties take to get their evidence, and how willing they are to negotiate. Simple personal injury lawsuits take up to a few months to get to a settlement. More serious cases can take several years until they get to that point.
Bottom Line - What to Do After Suffering a Soft Tissue Injury Due to a Car Accident
The best thing to do after getting a soft tissue injury due to a car accident is to contact a personal injury lawyer. Schuerger Shunnarah Trial Attorneys is one of the best options people in Texas can go for. Clients unsure about the results this law firm can deliver should check its website now to see what it has done for its clients.
This law firm also takes other kinds of personal injury cases, such as slips and falls or workplace accidents. It only takes a call to schedule a free consultation with one of its law experts!