When you or a loved one has been injured, it’s natural to want answers!
But your most important questions – like when will health be restored, is the damage permanent, how long will it take to recover, what does the future hold? – can’t be calculated.
And frankly, neither can the initial value of your injury claim.
That’s why I find online personal injury calculators are so misleading …
The truth is: online injury claim calculators only exist as a way to get you on the phone with a law firm. Because it’s not possible to enter information in an online personal injury calculator and get a truthful answer – no matter how hard you try!
Here’s Why Using A Free Personal Injury Calculator Is A Bad Idea:
1) Online personal injury calculators are based on assumptions: assumptions that insurance policies exist to cover medical expenses, lost wages, property damage, pain and suffering …
The truth is: those policies may or may not exist, and they may or may not apply to your individual injury claim. An online calculator can’t tell you any of that; only an experienced personal injury attorney can.
2) The value of applicable insurance policies typically isn’t known: if you don’t know what insurances apply – like coverages from the at-fault person, other third parties, or workers comp – you can’t possibly know accurate injury claim values to enter.
The truth is: it takes a lot of information, the legal expertise to understand which coverages apply to which areas of your claim, and phone calls to insurance companies to know how much those policies are worth and therefore what the potential value of your claim may be. That’s why – whether they sell you short or overestimate your personal injury claim’s value – a personal injury calculator is definitely not going give you anything like an accurate answer.
3) Just because a policy covers up to a certain limit doesn’t mean that’s how much you’ll get: even when policy limits ARE known – such as with your own auto injury coverage – that doesn’t mean you’ll get that amount. Your claim may be worth more, it may be worth less, other insurances may or may not apply …
The truth is: a personal injury calculator needs inputs in order to calculate outputs, and the case value it estimates is only as accurate as the numbers that are put into it. So a personal injury claim calculator can’t really tell you anything about your claim potential, because it just reiterates what you already know (or guessed at) … and aren’t you looking for a personal injury lawyer because you need help with what you DON’T know?
4) Online calculators work for the law firm, not for you! Think of an online personal injury calculator like click bait: the only reason they exist is to give the law firm more information about your claim. The more information you put in, the more the law firm knows about the potential value of your claim. It’s not their money, so they don’t care how accurate it is; they’re using the information you put in to their personal injury calculator for other indicators about the potential value of your claim – so they can tell which level of attorney should call you back.
The truth is: you’re going to hear back from somebody … but if your claim doesn’t sound like a hefty one, you’re not going to hear from an A player. Law firms like online personal injury calculators because smaller claims make good practice for junior attorneys, and more experienced attorneys don’t have to waste their time calling you back.
5) An online personal injury calculator can’t measure the important stuff: no matter how many online injury calculators you use, if you input the same information, you’re going to get the similar results. So while a personal injury calculator can help law firms pre-screen your claim, they can’t help YOU differentiate one lawyer from another. That takes personal contact.
The truth is: you can’t tell anything about the lawyer’s qualifications, experience, reputation, percent of cases settled vs won in court. You can’t tell if they’re easy to work with, have a pleasant personality, explain things in ways that make it easy for you to make good decisions … all the things that REALLY matter when you trust a personal injury lawyer with your claim.
6) Online injury calculators can’t be trusted: any answer you may get is highly suspect, for the reasons mentioned above.
The question to ask yourself is whether you really want to work with a law firm that’s comfortable using such tactics as a way to get your business. After all, It may be an indication of how they run theirs …
The truth is: to get the best legal take on your claim, you’re going to end up on the phone with a lawyer at some point. Why not just pick up the phone and have an honest conversation with one – instead of wasting time on an inaccurate personal injury calculator?
By the way, I’ll never put a personal injury calculator on my site. But I do have a phone … :^D
