How Is a South Carolina Car Accident Case Valued?
After a car accident, one of the first questions people ask is: “What is my case worth?”
That makes sense. Car accidents have a way of bringing the world to a stop. One minute you’re dropping the kids off at school or running errands. The next, you’re telling an officer what happened as your car is towed away. If you were injured, you may have medical bills. And if you can’t get a rental vehicle or need to keep going to the doctor, you’re probably missing time from work.
Those are real losses. It’s only natural to ask how much you can be compensated.
The answer, as with most questions you ask a lawyer, is: “It depends.”
It depends because no one person gets the final say. Although most cases involve car insurance, there isn’t a fixed case value sitting in an insurance file somewhere. An insurance adjuster might call and offer to settle your case, but that settlement number isn’t an exact calculation. It’s the insurance company’s evaluation of its risk.
When lawyers and insurance companies evaluate a claim, one of the central questions is: If this case goes to trial, what will a jury do?
If a case can’t be settled, a lawsuit is usually filed. At its core, a lawsuit is just a formal legal procedure where the parties ask someone else to decide the outcome. In most car accident cases, that decision maker is a jury. That means everyone evaluating these cases is trying to predict what evidence the jury will hear, how credible the witnesses will be, and how the jury is likely to respond.
In this article, we’ll walk through the factors that affect the value of a South Carolina car accident case and the decision whether to settle or go to trial.
In This Article:
- What Losses Can Be Included in a Car Accident Claim?
- What Evidence Will the Jury Hear?
- How Do Lawyers Evaluate What a Jury Might Do?
- Why Do Car Accident Cases Settle?
- What Will You Actually Receive From a Settlement?
1. What Losses Can Be Included in a Car Accident Claim?
The starting point for valuing a car accident case is identifying the full extent of the harm the accident caused. In South Carolina, money awarded for that harm is called compensatory damages.
The idea is simple. Compensatory damages are meant to reimburse you for financial losses and make up for the other losses that can’t be reduced to a bill or receipt.[i]
Financial losses, also known as “economic damages,” include things like medical expenses, vehicle repair or replacement costs, rental car expenses, and lost income.
Losses that don’t have a clear dollar value are known as “noneconomic damages.” These include pain and suffering, emotional distress, physical impairment, and inconvenience.
Economic damages are usually easier to prove. Most people know they need to gather medical bills, repair estimates, and wage records after an accident. It can be harder to show how an injury affected your daily life, work, sleep, relationships, and ability to do the things you enjoyed before the accident.
Compensatory damages can also include future losses. You may develop arthritis, need surgery years later, or earn less over the course of a career because of the injury. The evidence must show that those losses are reasonably certain to occur,[ii] which may require expert testimony.
If an accident results in death, South Carolina law may allow both a wrongful death claim for losses suffered by certain surviving family members and a survival claim for damages the injured person suffered before death. Those claims involve different rules and damages, which we discuss in more detail in our article about wrongful death claims in South Carolina.
Establishing the full extent of these losses gives you a starting point for deciding what fair compensation would look like. But it does not necessarily tell you what the case is worth. You still need to prove that someone else was legally responsible, that the accident caused the claimed injuries, and that the losses are supported by credible testimony and evidence. What you can prove ultimately affects both what a jury could award and what an insurance company may be willing to pay to settle the case.
2. What Evidence Will the Jury Hear?
If your car accident case goes to trial, a jury will usually decide the outcome. That means you’ll have to persuade a group of people from the local community that the other side was legally responsible and that you should be awarded compensation.[iii]
It sounds simple enough, but sometimes there is a difference between what is true and what a jury is allowed to consider.
In other words, the value of a case depends not just on what happened, but on what can be proven with admissible evidence.
At trial, most of the evidence the jury considers comes through witness testimony and exhibits. Testimony is what witnesses say under oath, while exhibits are the documents, photographs, videos, physical objects, and other items the jury can consider.[iv]
The rules governing whether evidence can be admitted depend in part on the court where the case is being tried. For purposes of this article, we’ll focus on jury trials in the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas and the South Carolina Rules of Evidence.
Before you can use evidence to persuade the jury, the judge decides whether the jury is allowed to hear it in the first place.[v] Clients are often surprised to learn that information they consider important after an accident can be excluded by the judge and never shown to the jury. For example:
Accident Reports
Police accident reports often influence how an insurance company evaluates the case, but they generally cannot be used at trial as evidence of negligence. The investigating officer may testify about what they personally observed and may use the report to refresh their memory, but the jury does not receive the report itself as proof of who caused the crash.
For more information about how an accident report can affect your case, read our article on South Carolina accident reports.
Liability Insurance
Before trial, settlement discussions are usually focused on how much an insurance company is willing to pay. But in most cases, once trial begins, jurors are not told whether the other driver even has liability insurance.[vi] That means the jury is supposed to decide fault and damages without considering who will ultimately pay the judgment. While insurance may be central to the real-world case value, it is generally kept out of the jury’s decision-making process.
Settlement Negotiations
Settlement offers and negotiations generally cannot be used to prove liability or the amount of a disputed claim. This prevents you from arguing that the other driver must be at fault simply because they offered to settle your case.[vii]
These rules matter because you, your lawyer, and the insurance company may all know things about the case that the jury will never hear.
Figuring out what evidence the jury will hear is only the first step. The next question is:
What do we think jurors will do with that evidence?
3. How Do Lawyers Evaluate What a Jury Might Do?
If you picked two people off the street, told them about your car accident, and asked what the case is worth, you would probably get two different answers. Sometimes, very different.
In the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, a jury is ordinarily made up of twelve people, and its verdict must be unanimous.[viii] Usually, those jurors are strangers to each other and to you. Each juror is a regular person from the community with their own experiences, assumptions, and sense of what is fair. That’s why it is hard to say exactly what a jury will do. No two juries or cases are exactly the same.
That doesn’t mean lawyers are just guessing. We look at the evidence and ask how a jury is likely to respond to it.
When the witnesses are credible, the evidence is consistent, and the injuries make sense, the case is easier for a jury to understand and believe. That is where the details start to matter.
Witness Credibility
One part of the jury’s job is deciding who to believe.[ix] If a witness seems confused, changes their story over time, or is contradicted by other evidence, the jury may discount or completely disregard their testimony.
This means that, when it comes to the value of your car accident case, the person testifying can be just as important as the facts themselves. Even a very strong case can become harder to prove if the key witnesses are not consistent and believable.
Medical Bills
If you’re injured, you can ask the jury to compensate you for your medical expenses. The jury decides whether the treatment was caused by the accident and whether the charges were reasonable.[x]
It can be easier to prove causation when you can testify that your treatment started soon after the accident, you consistently showed up for appointments, and you followed medical advice. In more complicated cases involving surgery, permanent injuries, or future medical care, expert testimony may also be necessary.
Health Insurance Payments
Usually, the jury will not hear what your health insurance company paid toward those bills. Under South Carolina’s collateral source rule, payments made by a source wholly independent of the at-fault driver, such as private health insurance, do not reduce what the at-fault driver owes.[xi]
This means the at-fault driver generally does not get credit for insurance payments or contractual write-offs. The focus remains on the reasonable value of the medical services.
Preexisting Medical Conditions
Most clients weren’t in perfect health before their accident, but just because you hurt your knee playing high school football or injured your back at work doesn’t mean a car accident can’t make that condition worse.
South Carolina law requires the at-fault driver to take the injured person as they find them.[xii]
Lawyers call this the eggshell plaintiff rule. If a crash breaks the bones of someone whose medical condition made them unusually fragile, the at-fault driver is still responsible, even if a healthier person wouldn’t have been as seriously injured.
For the jury, the toughest issue is usually deciding what the accident actually changed. The clearer the evidence is about the difference between your condition before and after the accident, the easier it is for the jury to understand how much the accident made things worse.
Pain and Suffering
Unlike medical bills, there is no document that tells the jury what your pain and suffering is worth. The jury will hear how your injuries changed your life, and then they’ll be asked to put a value on that. This is one of the areas where reasonable jurors can hear the same evidence and reach very different conclusions.
The more detailed you can be in your testimony, the easier it is to paint a vivid picture for the jury. We typically recommend keeping an injury journal for this reason. It can take years to get to trial, and it’s easy to forget details over time. It’s one thing to say, “I couldn’t sleep after the accident.” It’s another to explain, “I couldn’t sleep because I had a constant stabbing pain in my lower back. Even the medicine my doctor prescribed didn’t help. When I finally did fall asleep, I kept having nightmares about another car running a red light and crashing into me.”
Those details give jurors a better sense of what the injury actually felt like and turn “pain and suffering” from a legal phrase into the story of your real life.
Reckless Conduct
In most car accident cases, the jury is deciding what compensation is necessary to make up for the harm you suffered. But if the other driver’s conduct was willful, wanton, or reckless, the jury may also be asked to consider punitive damages.[xiii] That can mean evidence of things like drunk driving, racing, or running from the police.
Punitive damages serve a different purpose. Instead of compensating you for a loss, they are meant to punish especially dangerous conduct and discourage similar behavior in the future.[xiv] Because punitive damages can increase the range of what a jury may award, evidence of reckless conduct can materially affect case value.
The Risk of Losing at Trial
It is always possible that you could lose at trial. The jury may find that the other driver was not legally responsible, that your own fault reduces or bars your recovery, or that the accident did not cause your injuries.[xv]
So lawyers are not just evaluating how much a jury might award if you win. We also have to consider the possibility that the jury could find against you and award nothing at all.
4. Why Do Car Accident Cases Settle?
Most people don’t want to go to trial. When clients first meet with us, they typically expect their car accident case to get settled. In many cases, settlement makes sense because it provides certainty. Instead of a jury deciding the outcome, you make the decision.
The tradeoff is that settlement may require you to accept less than you could potentially recover at trial. Where to draw that line is a personal decision. Your lawyer can help you understand the risks of trial and the range of realistic outcomes, but only you can decide whether to accept a settlement offer.[xvi]
Several factors can affect that decision.
Insurance Coverage
Insurance coverage is one of the most important things to consider. In South Carolina, that can include the other driver’s liability coverage, uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage that applies to the accident, and in some cases, coverage available through another responsible person or business.
If there is limited insurance coverage, it may make sense to accept a settlement rather than pursue a larger jury verdict that may be difficult to collect.
Litigation Expenses
Taking a case to trial can be expensive. Case expenses may include filing fees, expert witness fees, mediation fees, and the cost of deposition transcripts and trial exhibits.
Those expenses can affect whether a settlement offer makes financial sense. The question isn’t just whether you could recover more at trial, but whether the potential increase justifies the additional cost.
Time and Stress
Litigation also takes time from your day-to-day life. Your attorney may need you to provide documents and information, sit for a deposition, attend mediation, and eventually prepare for trial. Some lawsuits take years to reach trial. During that time, there can be long periods of waiting between important events in the case. For some clients, the time and stress are important considerations when deciding whether to accept a settlement.
Bottom Line
None of this means that going to trial is a bad decision. Sometimes the settlement offer doesn’t fairly reflect the strength of the case or the harm you suffered. In those situations, the time, expense, stress, and uncertainty may be worth it. The important thing is making sure you understand the tradeoffs well enough to make the decision that is right for you.
5. What Will You Actually Receive From a Settlement?
The value of a case and the amount the client takes home are not always the same thing.
At the end of the case, your lawyer must give you a written statement showing the total amount recovered, the amount you’ll receive, and how that was calculated.[xvii] This settlement statement gives us a useful way to see the difference.
Let’s walk through a hypothetical $100,000 settlement, category by category.
Gross Recovery
This is the total settlement before any deductions are made. In our example, that would be $100,000.
Attorney’s Fees
Next, the settlement statement will show the amount being paid for the attorney’s services.
Personal injury cases are often handled on a contingency fee. That means the client does not pay an attorney’s fee up front. Instead, the attorney receives an agreed percentage of the recovery.
In South Carolina, a contingency fee agreement must be in writing, signed by the client, and explain how the attorney’s fee will be calculated.[xviii] The percentage can vary depending on the lawyer, the complexity of the case, and other factors.
For purposes of our example, we’ll assume the fee agreement provides for a one-third contingency fee calculated from the gross recovery. That would be $33,333.33 of the $100,000 settlement.
Case Expenses
The settlement statement will also show an itemized list of any case expenses that were advanced by the attorney. Those expenses are deducted from the gross recovery to reimburse the attorney.
For our example, we’ll assume the firm advanced $5,000 in case expenses.
Medical Bills and Reimbursements
The next section typically identifies any medical bills, liens, or other reimbursement claims being paid from the settlement.
In some cases, your lawyer may be able to negotiate those amounts before the case is closed. Reducing a medical balance or reimbursement claim can increase what you ultimately receive.
In our example, we’re going to say that $10,000 must be paid toward medical bills and reimbursement claims.
Net Recovery to the Client
After the attorney’s fee, case expenses, medical bills, and reimbursement claims are deducted, the client receives the net recovery.
Using our example, the following amounts would be deducted from the $100,000 gross recovery:
- $33,333.33 attorney’s fee
- $5,000.00 case expenses
- $10,000.00 medical bills and reimbursement claims
The client’s net recovery would be $51,666.67.
Conclusion
Although there is no formula for determining exactly what your car accident case is worth, an attorney can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your case and provide the information you need to decide whether to settle or go to trial.
If you or someone you love was injured in a car accident in Lexington or anywhere in South Carolina, we’re here to help. You can schedule a free personal injury consultation by calling our office at (803) 359-9000 or using the link below.
Last Updated: 9/1/2026
About the Author
Jason Yonge is a litigation attorney in Lexington, South Carolina. He represents clients across the state in serious personal injury, car accident, and wrongful death cases. For honest, straightforward advice about your situation, contact Jason to see how he can help.
[i] Clark v. Cantrell, 339 S.C. 369, 529 S.E.2d 528 (2000) (“The purpose of actual or compensatory damages is to compensate a party for injuries suffered or losses sustained. The goal is to restore the injured party, as nearly as possible through the payment of money, to the same position he or she was in before the wrongful injury occurred.”).
[ii] Pearson v. Bridges, 344 S.C. 366, 544 S.E.2d 617 (2001) (“[W]hether future damages are ‘reasonably certain’ to occur is the standard of proof for future damages, not the standard of admissibility.”).
[iii] In the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, jurors are selected from the “roll of eligible jurors” in each county. See S.C. Code Ann. § 14-7-130 et seq.
[iv] Ralph King Anderson, Jr., South Carolina Requests to Charge – Civil, Rev. ed., 2009, § 1-1 (The standard preliminary jury charge states: “You will take the facts as you find them to be from the witnesses who testify from this witness stand and any exhibits that may be introduced into evidence.”).
[v] See Rule 104, SCRE; Gamble v. International Paper Realty Corp. of South Carolina, 323 S.C. 367, 474 S.E.2d 438 (1996) (“The admission or exclusion of evidence is a matter within the sound discretion of the trial court and absent clear abuse, will not be disturbed on appeal.”).
[vi] Rule 411, SCRE (“Evidence that a person was or was not insured against liability is not admissible upon the issue whether the person acted negligently or otherwise wrongfully. This rule does not require the exclusion of evidence of insurance against liability when offered for another purpose, such as proof of agency, ownership, or control, or bias or prejudice of a witness.”).
[vii] Rule 408, SCRE.
[viii] Rule 48, SCRCP (“The jury shall be composed of twelve persons and their verdict shall be unanimous, except that the parties may stipulate that the jury shall consist of any number less than twelve . . . or that a verdict or finding of a stated majority of the jurors be taken as the verdict or finding of the jury.”).
[ix] Ralph King Anderson, Jr., South Carolina Requests to Charge – Civil, Rev. ed., 2009 § 1-2; State v. McKerley, 397 S.C. 461, 725 S.E.2d 139 (Ct. App. 2012) (“The assessment of witness credibility is within the exclusive province of the jury.”).
[x] Haselden v. Davis, 353 S.C. 481, 579 S.E.2d 293 (2003) (“A plaintiff in a personal injury action seeking damages for the cost of medical services provided to him as a result of a tortfeasor’s wrongdoing is entitled to recover the reasonable value of those medical services, not necessarily the amount paid.”).
[xi] Covington v. George, 359 S.C. 100, 597 S.E.2d 142 (2004) (“The collateral source rule provides that compensation received by an injured party from a source wholly independent of the wrongdoer will not reduce the damages owed by the wrongdoer.”) (internal quotation marks omitted).
[xii] Raino v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., 309 S.C. 255, 422 S.E.2d 98 (1992) (“The defendant takes the plaintiff as he is found and the plaintiff is entitled to recover damages resulting from the aggravation of a pre-existing condition.”).
[xiii] S.C. Code Ann. § 15-32-520(D).
[xiv] Clark v. Cantrell, 339 S.C. 369, 529 S.E.2d 528 (2000) (“The purposes of punitive damages are to punish the wrongdoer and deter the wrongdoer and others from engaging in similar reckless, willful, wanton, or malicious conduct in the future.”).
[xv] Nelson v. Concrete Supply Co., 303 S.C. 243, 399 S.E.2d 783 (1991) (establishing South Carolina’s modified comparative negligence rule).
[xvi] Rule 1.2(a), RPC, Rule 407, SCACR (“A lawyer shall abide by a client’s decision whether to make or accept an offer of settlement of a matter.”).
[xvii] Rule 1.5(c), RPC, Rule 407, SCACR.
[xviii] Rule 1.5(c), RPC, Rule 407, SCACR.
Not sure if your case qualifies?
Talk to us. We’ll give you a straightforward, honest assessment.
