How to Value a Personal Injury Case Before You Sign

Most plaintiff firms decide whether to sign a case in under 30 minutes. That decision either funds your firm for the next two years or costs you opportunity on cases you should have taken. Getting it right at intake is one of the highest-leverage operational decisions a PI firm makes — and yet most firms still rely on gut feel.

Here's the five-variable framework we've seen work consistently across medical malpractice, auto accidents, premises, and wrongful death cases.

1. Liability clarity

Start here because it gates everything else. If liability is contested, your settlement leverage collapses regardless of how bad the injuries are. The questions to pin down on the intake call:

• Is there a police report or incident report? Fault designations matter even when they aren't admissible — adjusters settle on them.
• Who was present as witnesses? Independent witnesses flip weak liability into strong.
• Is there video, photos, or electronic records? Surveillance, dashcam, ring doorbells — these exist on more cases than you'd expect.
• What doctrine applies? Rear-end presumption, res ipsa loquitur, negligence per se — each creates default liability in certain fact patterns.

Liability clarity scores don't need to be precise. "Strong / mixed / weak" is enough at intake. If it's mixed or weak, everything else has to be exceptional to justify the case.

2. Injury severity and documentation

Strong liability with soft-tissue-only injury is a small case. Soft liability with documented spinal surgery can still be a substantial case. Injuries drive damages; documentation determines whether damages survive motion practice.

What to confirm at intake:

• Was there an ER visit or hospitalization? ER records create contemporaneous documentation that defense can't attack.
• What's the treatment trajectory? Continuous treatment strengthens the case. Treatment gaps destroy it.
• Any surgical intervention or planned? Surgery is the single biggest case-value multiplier in most PI verticals.
• Pre-existing conditions to the same body region? This is the single biggest case-killer if you don't screen for it.

3. Damages documentation

Beyond the injury itself, the damages claim has to be provable:

• Medical bills. Not just the numbers — whether they're in collections, paid by health insurance (with subrogation rights), or outstanding.
• Lost wages. W-2 employment is easy. Self-employed plaintiffs need a story and records.
• Future care. Catastrophic cases need life-care planners; average cases don't.
• Non-economic damages. Pain and suffering is real but driven by the underlying injury severity and treatment.

4. Defendant capacity

A great case against an uninsured defendant is a bad case. Confirm at intake:

• Policy limits. Adjusters hate disclosing, but you need an estimate.
• Commercial vs personal. Commercial defendants carry higher limits and have more to lose on litigation.
• UM/UIM availability. When defendant limits are inadequate, underinsured-motorist stacking becomes the case.
• Multiple defendants? Joint and several liability in some jurisdictions changes the math.

5. Venue

Where the case is tried matters more than most firms account for. Philadelphia juries and suburban Pennsylvania juries return very different verdicts on identical fact patterns. Manhattan and upstate New York might as well be different states.

Venue affects:

• Jury tendencies. Urban jurisdictions with diverse juries trend plaintiff-friendly on clear liability. Suburban and rural jurisdictions are defense-leaning.
• Damages caps. States and case types vary dramatically. Med-mal caps in PA (MCARE) don't apply to auto.
• Procedural advantages. Certificate of merit requirements, notice-of-intent statutes, and discovery rules all vary by venue.

If you don't have real verdict data for the venue you'd try the case in, you're guessing. This is where county-level benchmarks become essential.

Applying the framework

Score each variable on a simple scale at intake — we use 0–180, divided into five tiers (rejected / review / follow-up / qualified / prime). The score isn't a prediction; it's a triage signal. High-scoring cases go to a senior attorney review. Low-scoring cases get referred out cleanly or closed.

What matters isn't the exact number — it's that every case gets scored on the same five dimensions so you're comparing apples to apples across your pipeline.

Where AI helps

AI scoring works when it's grounded in two things: real verdict data from comparable cases, and firm-specific rules about carriers, counties, and venues. Generic "AI" that just summarizes intake calls doesn't help triage — it has to be trained on patterns specific to personal injury law.

Valryn's scoring engine uses OpenAI embeddings indexed in PostgreSQL with pgvector, pulled from 1,700+ personal injury verdicts across 8 states. Every intake call is scored against comparable cases in the same state and county — so the score reflects what's actually winnable in your venue.

See how case scoring works → Read about county-level benchmarks →