Liability and Damages – Do You Know What Your Case Is Worth?

Start Transcript of Case Worth Part 1: Liability and Damages

Hello, my name is Brigham Cluff. I am an attorney with the law firm of Cluff Injury Lawyers. I'd like to talk to you a little bit today about analyzing how much your case is worth.

Recently I did a video where I addressed the same subject – how much is my case worth – from a little bit of a different angle. That is the approach of asking your attorney how much your case is worth. Now I think that is a very important question to ask. It's a critical question to ask and it really must be asked the entire way through your case. In that video I cautioned that it's very dangerous and really irresponsible for an attorney to venture a guess as to the value of a case if the attorney doesn't have sufficient information to really make an educated estimate of the value of a case.

It's very tempting sometimes to do that because client calls you and it's a case that sounds interesting. You want the case; client's interested to know a value of that case and there's this natural tendency to want to try to answer that question for the client. Usually you cannot give a very good estimation of the value of a case until you have dug into it quite a bit and done the investigation and the research and analysis that needs to be done before you can really evaluate a case.

In any personal injury case there are really two parts of the case that have to be looked at, and to some degree they need to be looked at independently. Those two parts of the case are liability and damages. Liability is usually the more interesting part of the case. It's the kind of analysis that you get to do where you can do some sleuthing and finding out, and sometimes you can even catch people in their words in a deposition. That's an exciting part of the case. It's critical; it's very important. I love handling that part of the case. Most lawyers love handling that part of the case.

There's another part of the case that if you're not careful it can get short shrift. That is the damages portion of the case. Damages is a critical aspect to any personal injury case. Basically when you're evaluating damages you are trying to answer the question: How much is this injury worth? How much is this suffering worth? How much are these lost wages worth? How much are these medical bills worth? Those are the kinds of components of damages that you normally have in a personal injury case.
End Transcript

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5-part Series on Determining a Case's Worth:

• Case Worth Part 1: Liability & Damages
• Case Worth Part 2: Focusing on Damages
• Case Worth Part 3: Showing Damages in Court
• Case Worth Part 4: Similar Injuries, Different Damages
• Case Worth Part 5: Summary