Back And Neck Injury Settlements

Neck injuries are one of the most common vehicle accident injuries, second only to bruises and contusions.

They are also one of the most commonly undervalued injuries in car accident settlements. The average value of back and neck injury settlements typically depends on three primary factors:

the extent of the injuries
the degree of fault on the part of the other party, and
the amount of insurance coverage available.

Some neck and back injuries are minor and often settle for around $10,000. But if the back or neck injuries were severe, debilitating, or paralyzing, the average settlement can be for hundreds of thousands or over a million dollars.

Why Does The Average Settlement For A Car Accident Vary So Much?

The wide range of “average” settlement amounts for a car accident case is because there is no such thing as an “average” claim. Intricate details about the accident, your injuries, and even your personal life can change the value of your case and significantly alter the expected settlement.

Every accident is different, even those that caused neck and back injuries. Even though these injuries affect the same body parts, some are much more severe than others and will come with much higher medical expenses. Extremely painful injuries will also cause more pain and suffering than those that are not debilitating.

Many states also give you the right to compensation for the loss of enjoyment of life. If your injuries will prevent you from doing the things you most enjoy doing, this can increase the expected settlement amount.

Additionally, different victims will suffer professional repercussions in different ways from similar accidents. The same neck or back injury can end a professional athlete’s career, while only causing a week of lost wages for an office worker. The athlete would be entitled to his or her lost earning capacity which could run into the millions of dollars, while the office worker would receive only a few hundred.

Your settlement after a car accident can also increase or decrease based on your network. Your spouse or loved ones would be entitled to compensation for their loss of consortium, or loss of companionship.

What is Mechanism of Injury

Mechanism of injury is the medical explanation of what happens structurally to your body during a traumatic event that caused your injury.

Without a medical explanation of the mechanism of injury in your neck injury claim, your case would boil down to – “I was in a car accident and now my neck hurts, give me money.” Meaning, without the jury’s understanding of this topic, how much money you get for a neck injury will be negatively affected.

An un-savvy car accident attorney will skip the medical lesson, and this limits their ability to prove the full extent of a client’s injuries. The result is a negative impact on your case, and back and neck injury settlements amount. The more serious your injury, the more problematic that becomes for you and your case.

A brief explanation of mechanism of neck injuries, and injury types, in car accidents will help you understand your claim.

Vulnerability of the Back & Neck During Accidents

Your neck is left virtually unprotected during a car accident. This likely explains why more than 80,000 back and neck injuries resulting from car accidents are recorded in the U.S. making traffic collisions the primary cause of back and neck injuries.

When traveling in a car, your body may be held firmly in place by a seat belt, but your head and neck are unrestrained and remain so up until the point of impact.

Upon impact, your head may jerk backwards and forwards, to the side or even be struck by flying debris. Rapid movements such as these can cause serious injury to the muscles, tendons, joints, ligaments, and nerves in the cervical spine, where your neck is located.

Not only does the impact of a collision affect the neck, but the anticipation of impact often causes the individual to tense their neck muscles, meaning that they will have more potential for injury than if their muscles were relaxed.

These are all factors that are part of the mechanism of your neck injury and understanding them better will be a part of how to make a stronger claim for whiplash after a car accident.

Mechanism of Back & Neck Injury Following a Car Accident

The following three major injury types can occur to the neck and cervical spine following a car accident:

Damage to the spinal cord or discs due to shearing and bending between the cervical vertebrae, physical stretching of the spinal cord or direct impingement by fractured vertebrae.
Fracturing of the cervical vertebrae and damage/rupturing of the ligaments and soft tissue that link the vertebrae together.
Direct impact damage to the soft tissues containing the trachea with larynx, esophagus, and major arteries and veins to both the head and brain.

The first two injury types are typically caused by an excess of bending, shearing, or displacements produced by force pushing the head and neck away from your upper body.

Compression-Flexion

This occurs when the head receives an impact when bent forwards, and produces vertebrae wedge and burst fractures, along with spine dislocations.

In a typical front-end or rear-end accident, the neck will bounce in both directions – forward and then returning to the headrest, or vice-versa. For this reason, the typical neck injury in an accident is a combination flexion-extension injury.

Hyperextension

A neck injury caused by hyperextension tends to cause damage predominantly to the soft tissues in your neck. While this is not life-threatening, it can lead to long-term disability and can be included in back and neck injury settlements demand. Knowing the relationship between this injury and a specific impact type (rear-end accident) can help establish medical causation in your case.

Hyperextension injuries can also cause vertebrae and spine dislocation. Although this injury is not as common, it is visible in imaging such as x-rays, which will help relate the injury to the accident more easily which can help you in claiming whiplash after a car accident.

Compression-Extension

This occurs when there is an impact to the face while the head is in a neutral or bent position, and can produce fractures of the spinal processes, damage to the load-bearing surfaces, and spine dislocations.

Tension-Extension

This occurs when the body accelerates quickly forward, causing the head to accelerate via the neck. This might happen to a passenger in a rear-facing seat with no head restraint, or an inadequately designed one.

Common Car Accident Back & Neck Injuries

Soft Tissue Damage

Tearing, sprains, or strains to the muscles, tendons and ligaments in the neck following a car accident are described as soft tissue damage. This type of injury is usually painful and often causes stiffness and tenderness in the neck. Whiplash is one form of soft tissue neck injury.

Neck Fracture

Causing significant pain and having the potential to injure your spinal cord leading to paralysis, a neck fracture is an extremely serious injury that requires immediate medical attention. Anyone suspected of having such an injury should remain as immobile as possible until medical assistance arrives.

When you go to the hospital following a car accident, they will often do an x-ray. This is to rule out that you do not have an “acute injury” (a serious injury), such as a neck fracture. The X-ray will not rule out a herniated disc or other discogenic injuries.

Slipped or Herniated Disc

During a collision in which a high level of impact occurs, the intervertebral discs in the cervical spine may slip out of place from between vertebrae and cause the injured disc to compress nerves in the spinal cord. When this happens, you can feel pain, weakness, tingling and numbness in the neck, hands, shoulders, arms, and fingers.

Facet Joint Injury

Helping to stabilize and mobilize the head and neck, the facet joints in the cervical spine can become inflamed and irritated during a car accident. The surrounding ligaments may also be damaged, affecting the range of motion and movement of your joints.

A doctor can diagnose if you have a facet joint injury by using a type of injection with a local anesthetic. You should speak with your pain management doctor about this.

Understanding the type and extent of an injury is very important for negotiating the maximum value of back and neck injury settlements.

Be Careful with Seemingly Not Serious Back & Neck Injuries

You need to be careful with back and neck injuries that do not seem serious. For your own sake, if you decide to wing it without a car accident attorney – which is a terrible idea for so many reasons – do not settle the case in the first 3-4 months.

Let your body go through the recovery motions and keep an eye on yourself so that your neck injury settlement amount comprehensively covers everything you went through because of the accident.

If you’re 100% better or think you are, wait another 30-60 days and see how you feel. If after that, you are symptom-free, then you know the full picture of your injuries and what you’re negotiating for.

How to Value a Back & Neck Injury For an Insurance Claim or Settlement

There are too many unique factors in any given personal injury case to predict the value of a back or neck injury claim, but there are commonalities to consider, and lessons to learn from past cases.

How Both Sides Value a Back & Neck Injury Case

“Valuing” a personal injury case in this context often means coming up with the best guess at what a jury might award a person who is suing for a back & neck injury (the plaintiff), and then estimating:

what the person being sued (the defendant) would be willing to pay, and
what the plaintiff would be willing to accept to settle the case before trial.

Regardless of which side is doing the calculation, the two key factors in valuing back and neck injury settlements are the extent of the plaintiff’s injuries and other losses (“damages” in legalese) and how likely the jury is to find the defendant at fault for the accident that led to the injury.

Nature, Severity & Duration of the Neck Injury

Back and neck injuries range from minor whiplash-like strains and sprains to spinal disk damage and cervical fractures.

In general, the more severe and long-lasting the injury, the higher the compensation in a personal injury insurance settlement or jury verdict. Additionally, “hard” injuries like a fractured bone (cervical fracture in the case of a neck injury) tend to result in larger settlements than soft tissue injuries like whiplash or pinched nerve (cervical radiculopathy).

Type of Medical Treatment Matters

Fair or not, many insurance companies will gauge the seriousness of an injury based on the nature and cost of the medical treatment required. A back or neck injury requiring spinal fusion or another surgical intervention will be “worth” more than a strained neck requiring a few weeks in a brace.

Similarly, injuries requiring treatment by physicians – as opposed to chiropractors, or even physical therapists – are given more weight by many insurance adjusters.

Estimating Damages

Estimating the potential recovery of damages due to a back or neck injury with any degree of accuracy is quite difficult for one main reason: at trial, it will most likely be a jury that ultimately decides just the settlement amount the defendant must pay you.

Some damages, like medical bills and lost income, are fairly easy to quantify. But for subjective damages like “pain and suffering,” predictions are at best an educated guess based on awards in similar neck injury cases.

Since every case and every jury is different, even the best analysis will still only predict pain and suffering damages within a broad range.

Another key factor is how the back or neck injury affects you. For example, if you’re an avid violin player, but can no longer hold the instrument properly because of the injury, your damages based on “loss of quality of life” will likely be higher in the eyes of a jury.

Similarly, if you had a preexisting neck injury, your damages might be reduced since it might not be possible to tie the defendant’s actions to all of your current pain and suffering.

Proof of Fault (Legal Liability)

The other major factor in valuing a back and neck injury case is the likelihood a defendant will be found liable at trial. If you have little or no evidence proving the defendant was at fault for the accident that led to your neck injuries, the value of the case goes down considerably.

Even if the potential damages are high, a defendant will be less willing to settle and more inclined to take their chances at trial. Similarly, you will be more inclined to accept a low settlement rather than run the risk of getting nothing at trial.

Need Legal Help?

If someone else was at fault for the accident that led to your back or neck injury, the best way to get the right information that’s tailored to your case is to talk to an experienced, reputable, and dedicated back and neck injury lawyer.

Back And Neck Injury Settlements

At Bobe & Snell Law Office LLC, we have an experienced, competent, and meticulous team of lawyers that handles and negotiates back and neck injury settlements for our esteemed clients. You can count on us to look out for your best interests and to negotiate the maximum settlement possible for you

Feel free to call us now at (470) 268-5802 or contact us online to schedule your FREE, No-Obligation Case Review/Consultation.

Back And Neck Injury Settlements

Seek Proper and Immediate Medical Attention After A Car Crash

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When the back or neck is injured, there is a chance that the spine and spinal cord will be damaged. Without proper and immediate treatment, a neck or back injury can cause debilitating, long-term pain and discomfort. Contact us now at (470) 268-5802 If you or a loved one has suffered a back or neck injury.

Back and Neck Injury Cases

by condormarketing

Back and Neck Injuries Lawyers

by condormarketing

Back and Neck Injuries Lawyers

Every year, over 800,000 cases of car crashes involving neck and back injuries are reported in the United States. Though back and neck injuries are the most common injuries associated with car accidents, their impact on the lives of the victims should not be understated. Neck and back injuries often cause chronic pain requiring ongoing medical treatment and sometimes lead to permanent disability. Whether these injuries stem from a motor vehicle crash, construction accident, a bad fall, or a criminal attack, our experienced and reputable back and neck injuries lawyers are more than happy and prepared to take on these complex cases to ensure you get the compensation that you deserve.

At Bobe & Snell Law Office LLC, we understand the way a neck or back injury can place major financial and emotional burdens on both the injured and their loved ones. The toll of neck and back injuries adds up quickly, forcing family members to carry the burden of arranging medical care, physical therapy appointments, and managing medical expenses all at once.

While it may be possible to settle a case for a substantial sum in the early stages, we also recognize the importance of being well prepared for trial. Some insurance companies will attempt to take advantage of a victim’s desperation to cover medical bills and other expenses, so they make a low-ball offer right away. But by accepting any money upfront, you may be forfeiting your right later to collect the total compensation you are due.

In some cases, there are going to be multiple defendants, and it is important to timely identify all potentially negligent parties and file timely action against them. Each case is going to differ, and the more extensive the injuries, the more important it is to seek top-notch legal representation.

Remember, back, neck, and spinal cord injuries can leave individuals unable to work or, in some cases, confined to a wheelchair or even a bed for the rest of their lives. Trauma to the neck, back, or spinal cord can result in a severe injury with disabling and sometimes permanent damage. Therefore, when it comes to these kinds of catastrophic injuries, victims should seek the assistance of a reputable law firm with a highly skilled and experienced legal team.

Seek Proper and Immediate Medical Attention

Any time you’re injured it’s a terrifying and concerning experience, however, when that injury involves the spine in any way, it can be life-altering. Back and neck injuries are often very serious and can require more treatment and rehabilitation than many other injuries.

A back and neck injury can cause excruciating pain and be extremely detrimental to physical and mental well-being. In addition, back and neck injuries can have a cascading effect, causing pain throughout the entire body and hampering mobility to extreme levels.

The neck and back are crucial to protecting the spinal cord, the fragile set of nerves that send signals between the brain and all other areas of the body. A back and neck injury can damage the spinal cord, leading to life-altering conditions, including chronic pain and even paralysis.

When a neck or back injury occurs, it is critical to understand that any damage to the spinal cord can be devastating. The long-term effects of a neck or back injury might not be readily apparent, and it’s essential to ensure that the injured person’s interests are protected.

Choosing an attorney with vast experience handling cases of back and neck injuries will ensure that your case gets the attention and expert representation it deserves.

So, if you or a loved one have suffered a back or neck injury, it’s critically important to seek legal representation from a back and neck injuries attorney who can skillfully navigate your case, as well as approach the attorney-client relationship with care and sensitivity.

Our back and neck injury lawyers are here to help you and therefore, you just need to schedule a FREE CASE REVIEW and CONSULTATION to get started.

Common Symptoms

Often, there is more to a back and neck injury than minor back and neck pain. The nerves of the spinal cord affect every part and function of your body. Therefore, back and neck injuries that affect the spinal cord often impact various bodily functions.

Sometimes, a severe back or neck injury may fail to heal fully, leaving the victim with a chronic pain condition.

Common back and neck injury symptoms include:

Chronic pain in the back or neck that worsens after long periods of standing, sitting, bending, walking, or lifting
Decreased range of movement and mobility
Excessive stiffness in the back and neck
A pulsating pain through the arms, legs, or hands
Dizziness and balance issues
Loss of bowel or bladder function
Headaches
Depression, irritability, or fatigue
Difficulty with concentration or remembering things
Difficulty sleeping

It is vital to have a back or neck injury properly diagnosed and receive proper immediate treatment as quickly as possible. When a damaged spine doesn’t receive the proper treatment, isn’t given enough time, or doesn’t heal properly chronic back and neck pain can worsen and significantly reduce an individual’s quality of life.

Data from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons show that lower back and neck pain are the most common physical conditions that impair a person’s ability to manage life’s daily activities.

Back pain is the primary cause of disability in the United States and one of the most common reasons people seek medical attention.

Thankfully, we have a team of back and neck injuries lawyers who are committed to helping victims of back and neck injuries due to someone else’s negligence get justice and compensation to help ease the emotional and financial burden on their shoulders.

You can count on us to do our best and fight for you to ensure you recover your damages and get your life back on track.

Common Types of Neck Injuries

The neck is a complex and sensitive part of the body, consisting of seven bones, or vertebrae, which form the upper portion of the spinal cord. These bones, which protect the nerves in the spinal cord, are themselves cushioned and protected by soft tissue like muscles, ligaments, and tendons.

Due to the fragility of the neck, it is important to seek immediate medical attention after sustaining even a seemingly minor neck injury. Some of the most common injuries to the neck include:

Whiplash Injuries – Usually caused by the sudden impact of a motor vehicle accident, whiplash occurs when an accident victim’s head is forcefully thrown backward and then forward in a snapping motion, well beyond the normal range of motion.
Neck Fractures – Neck fractures are diagnosed following an x-ray and can lead to difficulty or inability in moving your arms and legs.
Neck Sprains – Neck sprains, also called cervical spine sprains, can cause significant neck pain when moving or rotating the head or neck.

Common Types of Back Injuries

Back injuries vary widely; depending on the type of injury, the accident victim may experience sharp and cutting pain or aching and soreness. As with neck injuries, back injury victims may have difficulty walking or moving their arms and legs.

Some of the most common injuries to the back include:

Spinal Cord Injuries – Serious injuries to the vertebrae, discs, or ligaments in the spinal column or to the spinal cord itself (including thoracic spine fractures) can cause permanent changes in strength, mobility, and sensation.
Bulging Discs/Herniated Discs – A bulging or herniated disc is a condition that more commonly occurs in the lower back, in which the softer part of a spinal disc pushes through its tougher exterior, causing significant lower back pain.
Soft Tissue Injuries – Injuries to muscles, tendons, and ligaments in the back may occur as a result of sudden trauma, such as an auto accident.

Causes of Common Neck and Back Injuries

Many back and neck injuries are caused by the negligence or recklessness of others. In these cases, you deserve to be compensated for your injuries by the negligent parties.

Our back and neck injuries lawyers are here to help you seek compensation for your injuries, whether by filing a claim or lawsuit and representing you in a trial. We are ready to help you build a strong and compelling case against the relevant negligent party or parties to ensure you recover the damages due to your injuries.

Some of the most common causes of these injuries include:

Slip & Fall Accidents
Car Accidents
Truck Accidents
Motorcycle Accidents
Pedestrian Accidents

Proving Your Back and Neck Injury Case

To seek compensation for a back or neck injury, you must be able to prove:

The other party or parties had a duty to you
The other party or parties violated that duty
You suffered injuries because of that violation
The injuries caused you to sustain measurable damages

A significant part of this is demonstrating the severity of your injuries. Getting prompt medical care is essential, as it documents the severity of your injuries immediately after the accident. You must attend all scheduled and recommended appointments. Your medical records are an important piece of evidence.

You might also want to keep a personal injury journal. Pain is subjective, but a journal allows you to outline how your injuries have impacted your life. A personal injury journal describes your pain level each day and details how your injuries limit your daily activities.

Contact Us To Get Started

If you or a loved one has suffered a back or neck injury, contact the back and neck injuries lawyers at Bobe & Snell Law Office LLC today to discuss your case.

Keep in mind that states have a statute of limitations that specifies the timeline within which one must file personal injury claims and lawsuits. Therefore, you should act quickly to consult an experienced and reputable Back and Neck Injuries Lawyers on how to proceed with your case as you seek compensation.

Back and Neck Injuries Lawyers

Contact us now at (470) 268-5802 or fill out our online contact form to schedule a FREE, no-obligation case review/consultation.

Back and Neck Injuries Lawyers

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