How Much is a Herniated Disc Personal Injury Claim Worth? Kelly Law Team answers questions. Feel free to post comments below the video and John will get back to you with an answer.
Hi this is John Kelly of the Kelly Law Team. I just wanted to talk to you about a very common injury that we deal with as personal injury attorneys, which would be a bulging disc, or a herniated disc in an auto accident. I wanna give you some factors on how to calculate the value of these kind of claims, and to give you some pointers to make sure that you're doing everything you can to maximize the amount that you receive in this kind of injury. Like I said, it's a very common injury that we see diagnosed. One of the things that we have to establish in any personal injury claim that you're gonna need to be aware of when you're calculating your damages is, fist off, how much of that fault the other party was, or you were in the accident. So for instance, if you were in a common accident, which would be a rear end accident, say the police officers showed up, they took a report and they cited the other person for rear ending you, in that instance, almost always, the adverse insurance company, the one that hit you is gonna have to take 100% responsibility. There are circumstances where that doesn't apply, but that's not something we need to go into here. At that point, when you're calculating your damages, you're gonna be able to recoup 100% of your damages. Now if you are in a different kind of accident, say it's some kind of a T bone accident, or it's a lane change type of situation, and the insurance companies may attribute some fault to you. They may say you're 20% liable for this accident. Now that can be changed if you can dispute it and provide evidence, but if that ends up being the amount that you're attributed, you have to change your calculation. So you have to say, if I'm 20% liable for the accident, I have to deduct 20% from my settlement at that point. So if your settlement, for instance was $1,000, at that point, you're 20% liable, you can only recover $800. So that's how that would be factored in. If you are considered to be partially at fault, that doesn't mean you don't have a case, it just means that you may have to reevaluate your calculation. So some of the tips that I have to make sure once you do know that you have this type of injury to make sure that you're covering the full amount is to gather all of your medical records that you have related to the accident from all your providers. Now if you went to the hospital, you're going to want to order those almost immediately after the accident. That can take some time to get. You also wanna get any kind of billing records with that, so you wanna order the full bills and records, and that applies to any physical therapy, any chiropractic work, orthopedics that you go to. Anyone who you're referred out to, you wanna make sure that you're ordering those full bills and records, especially after you're done treating. The other thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you're getting diagnosed properly by your doctor, and you have to somewhat rely on your doctor to do this, but most good doctors, when you're complaining about a back injury are going to do some sort of an x-ray or a CAT scan. And you should be able to, at that point, see if there was a herniated disc in the actual results of that. So if you can, get a hold of those results so that you can send those off to the adjuster that shows that it was there. One of the things that adjusters often look at is whether the herniated disc was something that is more of a degenerative situation from older age, or if this was caused by an acute injury. If you have past scans of your back that don't show that injury, that bulging disc, that can be very helpful to establish that, but also your doctor should know how to document the file to you know, to see if your symptoms match an acute injury of a bulging disc in that type.
