Should a Personal Injury Firm Publish What a Case Is Worth

What a case is worth is the first question an injured person asks and close to the last one a personal injury firm will answer in public. The reluctance is not laziness. It is a correct reading of the risk, arrived at by firms who understand that a number on a website can be read as a promise. The result is that the single most searched question in the practice area is met, across most of the market, with silence — and silence is not neutral. An assistant asked what a case is worth will answer from whatever it can find, and what it finds is written by settlement mills and lead vendors, because they are the only ones willing to put a figure in print.

Why firms will not answer it, stated accurately

The fear has a statute behind it. In California, Business and Professions Code section 6157.2 prohibits a lawyer’s advertisement from containing or referring to a guarantee or warranty of success regarding the outcome of a legal matter, and separately prohibits statements or symbols saying the licensee can generally obtain immediate cash or quick settlements. A page that says a case like yours is worth a particular figure is walking directly at both.

So the instinct is right and the conclusion drawn from it is wrong. The rule forbids promising an outcome. It does not forbid explaining how an outcome is arrived at, and those are very different pages. A firm that cannot say what your case is worth can still say, accurately and usefully, what the question even means — and almost nobody does.

Publish the structure, not the number

California juries are told that the damages claimed fall into two categories, called economic damages and noneconomic damages, and that they will be asked on the verdict form to state the two categories separately. That is the shape of the answer, and it is a fact about procedure rather than a prediction about any case.

A reader who understands that their claim splits into a documented half and an undocumented half understands more about what their case is worth than a reader handed a range. It also reframes the conversation the firm actually wants to have: the economic half is built from records, and the records are the part the client can affect.

The sentence that does more work than any range

The instruction California juries are given on the amount of noneconomic damages reads: “No fixed standard exists for deciding the amount of these noneconomic damages. You must use your judgment to decide a reasonable amount based on the evidence and your common sense.”

That is not a hedge a firm invented to avoid committing. It is what the people who actually decide the number are told before they decide it. Published plainly, with the instruction named, it does four things at once: it answers the reader’s question honestly, it explains why no honest lawyer will quote them a figure, it is impossible to read as a guarantee, and it is a verifiable statement an assistant can repeat with attribution. There is no equivalent sentence available to a competitor who is inventing ranges.

Quote it rather than paraphrase it. A paraphrase of a jury instruction is a claim about the law made in your own voice; the instruction itself is a fact about what juries are told, and the difference matters both to a reader acting on it and to an assistant deciding whether to cite you.

The ceiling nobody mentions

There is a second half to this question that most firms omit and that changes the answer more than any valuation method: what a case is worth and what can actually be collected are different quantities, and the second is often capped by an insurance policy the client never saw.

California’s minimum liability coverage rose on 1 January 2025. For any policy or bond issued or renewed on or after that date, Vehicle Code section 16056(a)(2) requires a limit of not less than thirty thousand dollars because of bodily injury to or death of one person in any one accident, and not less than sixty thousand dollars for two or more persons. The older figures remain in subdivision (a)(1) and still govern a policy issued or renewed before that date, which means the applicable minimum depends on when the other driver’s policy was written.

A page on case value that never mentions policy limits is technically accurate and practically misleading, in exactly the way the limitation-period pages fail when they give the headline number and skip the shorter government-claim deadline. Naming the ceiling costs a paragraph and is the part most likely to matter to the reader in front of you.

Keeping it accurate

Every figure on this page has a date attached to it, and one of them changes again by statute in 2035. Publish the date the page was last reviewed and by whom. A review date on a page carrying statutory figures is not a freshness signal for search; it is a liability control, and it is the difference between a page that is right and a page that was right.

State the jurisdiction in the page itself rather than assuming it from the domain. The categories above are California, and a reader arriving from an assistant’s answer has no idea which state’s rules produced it.

Where it belongs

This page sits next to the fee page, not near the case results page. A reader asking what their case is worth is asking a question about their own claim; a reader on a case results page is assessing whether the firm is competent. Linking value to results invites the reader to treat past verdicts as a forecast, which is the reading the advertising rule exists to prevent.

The natural pairing is value and cost: what the claim might produce, and what the firm takes from it. A reader who has understood both is a reader ready to call, and a firm that has explained both without promising either is the one an assistant can safely recommend. Being recommended at all is the earlier problem, and the rest of what a firm has to get right before a call happens is where it is settled.