How Much Is a Car Accident Case Worth in Bakersfield, CA?

[00:06] McCartney: Welcome back to Car Accident Attorney with Robert May. I'm McCartney, and today I'm here with Robert May from The May Firm. Great to see you, Robert. Thanks for being here today

[00:13] Robert May: Nice seeing you again, McCartney

[00:15] McCartney: So today we're talking about what a California car accident settlement is actually worth, is actually worth here in Bakersfield. It's the question every injured person asks first, and the one insurance companies work hardest to keep low. We're going to walk through what really decides the number, the pieces that make up a claim and how to make sure a case is valued for everything that it's worth. So almost everyone wants a single dollar amount, but the honest answer is that several factors set it. When someone in Bakersfield asks what their California car accident case is worth, what actually decides that number?

[00:44] Robert May: Well, it's a complex set of factors. I would say first and foremost, you're gonna start with, uh, what are the damages? Damages are... There's a few pillars to damages. So there's gonna be economic damages. You can kinda think of those as like calculator damages. Um, you know, I lost 18 hours of work. I incurred $4,300 in medical expenses. I'm going to have an additional 2,000 medical-- $2,000 in medical expenses and I think I might miss four more weeks of work. So you could add up, let's say if somebody's paid by the hour, you do an hourly rate for the time lost, the time that'll be lost in the future. You add up the medical expenses, and that's gonna make up your, what I would call, like calculator Excel damages, where you can really look at it pretty clearly. And then there's a second factor to that, which is non-economic damages, which is, um, a little more ethereal in nature, and it really comes down to story and narrative and being able to communicate all the different subcategories of loss that, um, clients deal with.

[00:44] And I'm actually gonna pull up the jury instruction really quick. I actually want to read this off 'cause I think it might be interesting for people to know that there's no cate- there's no, like, there's not a formula to it, and it's really comes down to being able to candidly and honestly express all these. And the, e-economic and non-economic damages are calculated past and future. it includes things like physical pain, mental pain, mental anguish, suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, disfigurement, physical impairment, inconvenience, grief, anxiety, humiliation, emotional distress. So when people say, you know, non-economic damages or emotional suffering, uh, those are the factors that go into, how that's calculated. in the end, It's really about, you know, what your lawyer thinks it's worth and what you believe as the client it's worth, and then be incredible enough as a client to truly express those losses in a way that, sort of transcends the natural disposition of people to sort of question those things.

[00:44] You know, it's really hard when someone says they have a headache to see their headache or, you know, you could go down the road. But it comes down to credibility on the client side and narrative storytelling on the attorney side.

[02:49] McCartney: So you touched on this a little bit already, but people hear the word damages and they rarely know it splits into two very different buckets. What is the difference between economic and non-economic damages in a California claim?

[03:01] Robert May: Non-economic damages going backwards are kind of what we just read off that jury instruction, which are the disfigurement, loss of enjoyment of life, emotional distress, all those. Again, they're sort of ethereal. They are the ability to-- They come down to the ability to sort of communicate all these losses that somebody sort of quietly endures in many ways. You know, if you think of something like anxiety or, um, even humiliation, it's like, well, what does that mean? And a lot of that is really internal. versus economic damages, which, to what we talked about earlier, I kinda call those, those are like your calculator damages. You know, that's past loss of earning, future loss of earning, medical bills incurred, medical bills that will be incurred based on medical recommendations that are related, causally related to the, in this case, car accident. So those are the, those are the real difference. Sort of think of it as like one you could create an invoice for or a uh, pay stub for, and the other you have to kinda look inside and tell that story from the inside out

[03:55] McCartney: So it sounds like that number's really built from all of that at once, the damages, the medical bills, the fault picture, and the coverage on the table. Now let's get into the single biggest lever of them all, because it's the injuries themselves that move the value the most. This is where two crashes that look identical on paper end up worth very different amounts. How much does the type and severity of injury change what a case is worth?

[04:18] Robert May: massively. I mean, you can have the same car accident. You can have one person in the driver's seat, one person in the passenger seat, and there's no correlation to what, quote, "the cases are worth" or the damages incurred, the losses, et cetera. You could have one person who hit their head, had a massive concussion, and really sort of never got back to baseline. You can have somebody else who said, "Oh, my neck was sore for a couple weeks, went to some physical therapy, and I'm good to go." And so, in answering that question, uh, y- you can't value it based on just seeing photos or even, even two people being in the same collision. They can be worth completely different amounts because the losses, the human harms are totally different

[04:59] McCartney: On that note, whiplash is the most common crash injury and also the one insurers fight the hardest. Why do soft tissue injuries like whiplash get treated differently from a broken bone?

[05:11] Robert May: Well, we all love photos and pictures. That's why, you know, if I tell you... If you s- hear about a police shooting and then you see a police shooting, they seem completely... You'll emotionally react different to them. And as much as a sprain or a strain or whiplash cause the person enduring the pain, what they're going through is totally personal to them, it becomes much more difficult to expli- express. But if I take out a MRI film or if I take out an X-ray and I show your collarbone and it's, you know, there's a gap this b- between the, the two bones, you're gonna go, "Oh, wow, this is really, really bad." Whereas, you know, if I dislocate my shoulder and it pops back in and you look at an MRI or an X-ray, you go, "Hmm, looks fine." But one person might heal in six week, the other person might need, might spend the rest of their life with their left shoulder popping out every time they raise their hand too high and things like that. So we're so accustomed, and we've become more and more accustomed to be able to see things and feel things through images, that becomes much, much easier when there's sort of what people like to call objective evidence of injury versus the subjective complaints of what someone's going through. That's where credibility becomes so key in those cases, where the image isn't as compelling as maybe the person suffering the sprain, strain, or the less objective injury. It comes down to the credibility of your client every time

[06:33] McCartney: A lot of people assume a prior injury kills their claim. California law says otherwise. What happens to the value of a case if someone had a preexisting condition?

[06:41] Robert May: What happens to the value? Well, it really depends on what the preexisting condition is. It depends on whether or not the client is upfront and sort of expresses that upfront so you can differentiate between what it was, even if it's in a similar location. You can have a prior low back injury, for example, but let's say you're doing really well afterwards, you're back to hiking, you're back to living your life, going to work, and then you suffer a car accident, you aggravate a preexisting injury. Well, under the law, the insurance company, the defense, they take you as the plaintiff, they take you as you come. It's called the eggshell plaintiff. So you might be more susceptible to injury, but you're just as entitled to the damages and to the compensation, whether you were or were not someone that had a low back injury before

[07:29] McCartney: the injury is what drives the value up or down, how severe it is, whether it shows up on a scan, and how an old condition factors in. So now let's talk about proving it, because a number is only worth what you can actually document. And here in Kern County, some of that proof is local. Value is not what you say happened. It's what you can prove happened. What documents and evidence make the biggest difference in proving a case is worth more?

[07:52] Robert May: If you're strictly looking at economic damages, I mean, what it comes down to is expert reports. Um, so you're gonna... Well, let's go back to the beginning. At the beginning, you're gonna have sort of the beginning of treatment. You're gonna have all those medical records. Could be ambulance, ER, uh, primary care doctor, physical therapist, surgeon, post-surgical care, et cetera. So you're gonna take all those documents, and as simple as that sounds, that's probably, 400 pages worth of medical records. Then you're gonna have the accompanying bills. So those become critically important, and then often your attorney will hire experts to synthesize all that information and give you an explanation of where you as the client are at today, and then what your life statistically or more likely than not, more likely than not will look like in the future. So, are you at status quo and you're gonna be good to go moving forward? Or is this a lifelong situation you're going to have to deal with for the next 20, 30, 40 years? So medical records, expert reports, those really are a very, very key way to show damages in these cases. Secondarily, you can go to, like, family members, psychologists, psychiatrists, that goas we were talking about earlier, more the internal, kind of what you see somebody going through. That's, uh, that's the other second pillar of the damages equation. But if we're just talking about that calculator damages, for lack of a better word, then that's what you're looking at is your medical bills and expert reports. 'Cause you're not gonna have future medical records, but you can have expert reports that sort of forecast what the future will be

[09:16] McCartney: People are surprised that geography can move the number at all. Does where the crash happened, like here in Bakersfield, change what a case is worth?

[09:23] Robert May: That's a really interesting question. So in some ways the answer is yes. So if you look at things like jury verdicts throughout California and you go from county to county to county, without naming names of counties, there are places that are more desirable for plaintiffs' attorneys specifically where they wanna try cases more than other counties. Sometimes it has to do with demographics, voting styles. Uh, oftentimes it's the type of case that's involved. Um, but yes, insurance companies also keep records of jury verdicts within certain counties and they will make their evaluation based on the client, the lawyers involved, and then also the geography does impact oftentimes what the forecast is on, expected verdict values. So yes, it does

[10:09] McCartney: So the number's only real once it's backed up. The collision report, the medical records, the wage proof, and the local knowledge of how Kern County handles these cases. So that's the whole picture, what decides the value, what the injury's due to it, and what it takes to prove it. For someone in Bakersfield who just wants to know what their case is really worth, what is your one piece of advice?

[10:29] Robert May: One piece of advice, if you wanna know what your case is worth, sign nothing. Call a couple of lawyers, get opinions. Make sure you know what your case is, though. So do you know what injuries you've sustained? Do you know what doctors you've gone to? Do you know how are you doing today? What do you need in the future? Things like that. So you can get very rough estimates, but always remember, in a personal injury case, there's always that quiet factor of what is available when it comes to coverage. So I mean, you could call with the most devastating loss, but if the at-fault party is somebody with no insurance and no assets, what's recoverable is then different from what the case is truly worth and what the human harms that the person calling has endured But talk to a lawyer

[11:14] McCartney: Thank you so much, Robert. If you've been in a car accident in Bakersfield and you're not sure what to do next, make that call. You can reach The May Firm at 661-244-9712 or at mayfirm.com. Thanks for watching, and we will see you on the next episode of Car Accident Attorney with Robert May

[11:31] Robert May: Thanks, Ricardo