How we calculate a case-value range
Calculation engine version 2.0.0. Last updated 2026-07-29. This page documents what the calculator actually does, including the parts it cannot do.
What this produces, and what it is not
The calculator produces an illustrative range. It is not a valuation, an appraisal, a prediction, or an offer. It is built from four things: the type of claim, the injury and treatment details you report, the economic losses you report, and the statutory rules of the state where the injury occurred.
It has no access to the evidence in your case, the defendant's insurance limits, your medical records, the venue's verdict history, or the insurer's posture. Those materially affect an actual outcome and can move it well outside the range shown. A range that ignores them cannot be a prediction, and we do not present it as one.
Step 1 — Base band by claim type
Every claim type starts from a wide band. The bands are wide deliberately: a handful of questions on a web form cannot distinguish a soft-tissue claim that resolves at $9,000 from one that resolves at $40,000, and a narrow range would imply precision the inputs do not support.
| Claim type | Base band |
|---|---|
| Auto accident | $8,000 – $90,000 |
| Personal injury | $6,000 – $75,000 |
| Medical malpractice | $40,000 – $400,000 |
| Workplace injury | $12,000 – $150,000 |
| Product liability | $20,000 – $250,000 |
| Wrongful death | $80,000 – $800,000 |
| Other claim | $4,000 – $45,000 |
Step 2 — Injury, treatment and ongoing care
Three multipliers are applied to both ends of the band. They multiply rather than add because they interact: severe injuries with no treatment, and minor injuries with surgery, are both internally inconsistent answers, and multiplying keeps the result coherent without needing a rule for every combination.
Treatment is weighted at least as heavily as the description of the injury, because documented treatment is what makes an injury provable. An injury nobody treated is very difficult to value regardless of how it felt.
| Injury severity | |
|---|---|
| no injury reported | 0.35× |
| minor injuries | 0.60× |
| moderate injuries | 1.00× |
| severe injuries | 1.90× |
| permanent injury or disability | 3.10× |
| Treatment received | |
|---|---|
| no treatment | 0.40× |
| emergency room visit | 0.85× |
| treatment by a doctor | 0.80× |
| physical therapy | 1.10× |
| hospital admission | 1.60× |
| surgery | 2.10× |
| multiple forms of treatment | 1.80× |
| Ongoing care | |
|---|---|
| treatment complete | 1.00× |
| short-term ongoing treatment | 1.15× |
| long-term ongoing treatment | 1.45× |
| lifelong care expected | 1.90× |
| treatment duration not yet known | 1.05× |
Step 3 — Documented economic losses
The medical expenses and lost wages you report are added together and used as a floor: the low end of the range will not fall below your reported economic losses, because a claim cannot reasonably be worth less than the bills and wages already lost. Where reported losses are large relative to the base band, they also raise the ceiling.
These fields are free text, so we parse a range of formats — “$12,500”, “about 12k”, “15,000-20,000”. A range is read as its lower bound, which is the conservative reading. An answer with no usable figure in it contributes nothing rather than being guessed at.
Step 4 — State law
This is the step that makes a state-specific calculator more than a label. Four statutory rules are applied where we hold a reviewed law record for the state:
- Comparative fault. The range is reduced by an assumed share of your fault. Where the state bars recovery above a threshold and the assumed share exceeds it, the calculator returns zero and explains why rather than showing a small number.
- No-fault thresholds. In a no-fault state, an auto claim with low reported severity or no treatment may be capped near the PIP limit, because such a claim frequently cannot clear the statutory threshold required to recover non-economic damages at all.
- Damage caps. Where a state caps non-economic damages for the claim type, the ceiling becomes the cap plus documented economic loss, since economic damages are uncapped in every state we currently cover.
- State-specific bars. California's Proposition 213, which removes non-economic damages from an uninsured driver's claim, is surfaced as a factor rather than assumed.
The fault assumption, stated plainly
The most significant assumption in the whole calculation is this one. We ask who was responsible in four broad categories rather than asking for a percentage, because claimants do not know their comparative fault percentage and any figure they supplied would be meaningless. We therefore assume a representative share per answer: 0% where you say the other party was responsible, 15% where responsibility is not yet established, 30% for shared responsibility, and 70% where you say you were mostly responsible.
Those are assumptions, not findings. Fault is contested and ultimately allocated by a jury. In a state with a fault bar, the difference between 49% and 51% is the difference between a recovery and nothing, and no calculator can resolve that.
States with a reviewed law record
State adjustments are applied only where we hold a reviewed record. Where we do not, the calculator says so on the results screen rather than silently producing a national number and implying it is state-specific.
| State | Fault rule | System | Reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | Pure comparative | At-fault | 2026-07-29 |
| Florida | Barred above 50% | No-fault | 2026-07-29 |
| New York | Pure comparative | No-fault | 2026-07-29 |
| Texas | Barred above 50% | At-fault, optional PIP | 2026-07-29 |
Where our data comes from
Geography and population. City names, Census place GEOIDs, county assignments, coordinates, and land areas come from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2023 Gazetteer files. Populations come from the Census Bureau's 2024 subcounty population estimates. None of it is scraped from another site, and it is regenerated by script rather than typed in.
Crash data. Fatality figures and all-crash figures come from different datasets and are never combined or presented as if they came from one. NHTSA's FARS is a census of fatal crashes only — it does not contain total, injury, or property-damage crash counts. Those come from state systems: the FLHSMV Crash Dashboard and Florida Health CHARTS in Florida, the TxDOT annual crash summary tables in Texas. Every figure on a page carries its source and the date we last checked it.
Crash counts move. State systems accept late reports — Florida allows agencies up to 90 days and refreshes monthly — so a count for a recent year rises slightly over time. Where a publisher rounds a figure, we say so rather than implying precision it does not have.
State law. Read from the statutes and linked to the official source, with the date we last reviewed it. Two of our four pilot states have rules that changed recently enough that most secondary sources are still wrong: Florida replaced pure comparative negligence with a 50% bar and cut its negligence limitations period from four years to two in March 2023, and California raised its minimum liability limits in January 2025 for the first time since 1967.
What we do not do
- We do not use a settlement database. We do not claim to analyse a corpus of resolved cases, because we do not hold one. Court records do not capture most settlements, published verdict reporters are selective, and an average drawn across mixed jurisdictions, mixed outcome types, and mixed injury severities describes no actual claim.
- We do not blend outcome types. If we later add court-record data, jury verdicts, bench verdicts, court judgments, reported settlements, consent judgments, arbitration awards, and dismissals will be kept as separate categories rather than averaged into one figure.
- We do not claim the system learns. There is no model being retrained here. The calculation logic is a documented set of rules, and it changes when we change it and publish a new engine version.
- We do not rank or recommend attorneys. We publish no attorney profiles or ratings.
How this service is paid for
CaseValuation.com is operated by LuxeLaw LLC, which is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. We do not sell your personal information to unrelated data brokers. With your express consent, we may transmit the information you submit to one or more participating attorneys who pay us for advertising or lead-generation services. Payment does not make an attorney our agent or partner, and it is not a recommendation, endorsement, or quality-based referral.
You can receive your estimate without agreeing to be contacted by any attorney. Full detail is in our privacy policy and legal disclaimer.
Corrections
If a figure, statute citation, agency link, or court address on any page is wrong or out of date, tell us at [email protected] and we will check it against the source and correct it.