Washington Personal Injury Lawyers - Seattle Personal Injury Attorneys

Personal injury statistics are a great source of information for many reasons. No matter if you are doing research or looking for facts about personal injury cases, these personal injury statistics should meet your needs.

Statistics Related to Personal Injury Claims

Personal injury cases can involve a wide variety of scenarios, settings, and circumstances. With such complex wide-reaching data sources to draw from, compiling statistics related to personal injury cases can be a time-consuming and costly process. Reliable and accurate statistics can be hard to locate. The following statistics related to personal injury cases are provided by the United States government.

Spinal Cord Injury Statistics

Spinal cord injuries are a common occurrence in many personal injury cases and can significantly impact an accident victim’s quality of life and ability to perform even the simplest of daily activities.

Nearly 200,000 people in the U.S. live with a disability related to a spinal cord injury (SCI) (Berkowitz 1998).
Approximately 11,000 Americans sustain an SCI each year (CDC unpublished data).
The leading cause of SCI varies by age. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause among persons under age 65. Among persons age 65 and older, falls cause most SCIs (CDC unpublished data).
Sports and recreation activities cause an estimated 18% of SCI cases (Berkowitz 1998).

Traumatic Brain Injury Statistics

Many personal injury accident victims suffer traumatic brain injuries. These injuries can go mostly unnoticed in everyday life, or they can severely impact a person’s functional capabilities. Brain injuries can produce a wide range of problems and are a significant factor in determining the monetary value of a personal injury settlement.

Recent data shows that, on average, approximately 1.4 million people sustain a TBI each year in the United States.
Direct medical costs and indirect costs such as lost productivity of traumatic brain injuries totaled an estimated $60 billion in the United States in 2000.
The leading causes of traumatic brain injuries are

Falls (28%);
Motor vehicle-traffic crashes (20%);
Struck by/against events (19%); and
Assaults (11%)

Tort Trial Statistics

Tort trial statistics involving personal injuries provided by the Bureau of Justice are as follows:

Plaintiffs won in 48% of tort trials terminated in U.S. district courts in 2002-03.
Plaintiffs won less frequently in medical malpractice (37%) and product liability (34%) trials.
An estimated 9 out of 10 tort trials involved personal injury issues — most frequently, product liability, motor vehicle (accident), marine, and medical malpractice cases.
Eighty-four percent of plaintiff winners received monetary damages with an estimated median award of $201,000

New personal injury claims are filed every day, statistics change, and up-to-date statistics are difficult to come by. However, the above statistics are provided by reliable sources like the United States Government’s Center for Disease Control, National Security Council, and the Bureau of Justice.