Personal Injury Law

Disc Injuries: Settlement and Trial Value Aid

Jury Verdict Research provides some incredibly interesting data this month on a topic of great interest to accident lawyers: disc injuries. Eighty percent of disc injuries that go to trial are from injuries suffered in auto/truck/motorcycle accidents. The median verdict in a disc injury case is $50,000. The average disc injury verdict is $340,328, which includes the 7% of disc injury cases where the award exceeded $1 million.

Many disc injury cases are complicated by either a preexisting injury or because of degenerative disc disease. (Defense lawyers blame spondylosis for just about everything, even if the plaintiff had never had so much as a back ache prior to the accident.) For degenerative disc disease injury, the average jury award is $51,678 ($11,482 median). For aggravation of preexisting disc injuries, the average award is $152,932 ($29,379 median).

The difference in the values between bulging/protruding disc versus a herniated or ruptured disc was rather pronounced. For bulging/protruding discs, the average jury award was $140,311 ($31,000 median). The average jury award for herniated or ruptured discs was $413,917 ($60,000 median).

Obviously, you cannot extrapolate from this data the settlement or trial value of an individual accident case. But seeing relative data for different types of disc injury cases does provide at least a small piece of the complex puzzle of valuing disc injury cases claims.

• Herniated Disc Cases (an overview)
• Sample MRIs in Disc Injury Cases
• Cervical Herniated Disc Values (median value in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. for disc herniations in the neck)

Full post as published by Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on August 05, 2009 (boomark / email).