The average wrongful death settlement is extremely difficult to determine due to the various circumstances involved in each case. Some estimates range from $100,000 to $10 million or more.
At Stone Rose Law, we understand how necessary it is in an Arizona wrongful death case to help our clients understand what they can expect to see while still providing compassionate legal representation. Call us at (480) 498-8998 to speak with one of our wrongful death lawyers, who can answer questions like these and more.
In this post, we cover the factors and considerations that go into maximizing your recovery for the loss of a loved one in a wrongful death incident.
You can look online and find several opinions about how much money a successful wrongful death plaintiff might recover. These estimates range from $100,000 to $10 million or more.
This range is so big because most wrongful death cases settle out of court for undisclosed amounts, making it hard to get much information on case outcomes. Another reason is that no two wrongful death cases are exactly alike. The underlying facts of each case make each settlement or judgment unique and difficult to compare with others.
We believe that instead of trying to pin down a dollar amount value, the best way to give you a sense of the average value of a wrongful death case is to take a closer look at the considerations that go into a settlement and how they can affect a settlement amount.
Negotiating a wrongful death settlement requires thorough preparation, starting with your attorney’s understanding of factors a court would consider if the wrongful death claim goes to trial. Often, an attorney will file a wrongful death lawsuit against the defendant in Arizona Superior Court as a prelude to beginning negotiations. This puts the defendant on notice that you are serious about pursuing your claim and preserves your claim before the applicable Arizona statute of limitations expires.
Soon after taking your case, your attorney begins a factual investigation of the wrongful death incident. The purpose of this investigation is to gather and preserve material, circumstantial, and testimonial evidence, prepare a wrongful death cause of action for filing in court, and identify whether special preparations will also be necessary, like engaging expert witnesses or accident reconstruction specialists.
Once your wrongful death attorney has gathered sufficient evidence to support filing a wrongful death lawsuit, the attorney will communicate with the defendant. This communication may initially be directly with the defendant, starting with a demand letter or by serving a summons and copy of the wrongful lawsuit.
During this interval, if the defendant has any kind of liability insurance, like automobile liability coverage, premises liability, homeowners’ insurance, or medical malpractice liability insurance, the insurance company will usually engage an attorney to act on its and the defendant’s behalf. Sometimes, the defendant will retain separate legal counsel.
Once all the attorneys for the parties are in place, the settlement negotiations begin. Negotiations and fact-gathering often happen in parallel. For example, the evidentiary discovery process can overlap negotiations if your attorney has filed a wrongful death lawsuit. This means that additional evidence can become available as negotiations progress and can influence the negotiating positions.
Settlement negotiations usually cover the following factors:
The importance of investigating and preparing your wrongful death claim for trial is to convince the defendant’s attorneys that you are serious about pursuing a remedy for your loved one’s death and that you can establish a strong argument for the defendant’s liability.
The willingness of the defendant’s attorneys to negotiate and their willingness to compensate you in the amount you deserve depends greatly on their perception of the strength of the case against their client.
The higher the defendant’s likely degree of fault for the wrongful death, the more likely you will receive a higher settlement.
As we will see below, one aspect of the value of a wrongful death claim is the lost potential value of the victim’s life. The younger the victim, the more you conceivably lose in the value of what that family member could have contributed in income, services, and support. On the other hand, an elderly victim may mean that the possible value of lost future contributions will be less.
There is no linear formula to determine how much value to assign to a wrongful death victim’s future value income and services. For example, if the victim was a child, the defendant’s attorneys may argue that it is too uncertain to know how long that person would have lived in the absence of the wrongful death incident.
Still, as a general principle, a younger decedent will strengthen your negotiation position for a higher settlement amount.
The cost of any medical treatment the decedent received can be measured by the medical bills you have to pay. Your out-of-pocket medical expenses for your loved one’s care before dying are economic or direct damages, and your attorney will argue that you should be compensated for those costs.
Funeral and burial expenses of the deceased are also a form of economic damages. As with medical treatment costs, these are relatively easy to calculate based on the bills you receive.
Perhaps the only argument that the defendant’s attorneys may make to compensate you for these economic damages would be if they believe that these costs were unreasonably high, but ordinarily, this factor is not one where your wrongful death attorney will receive much opposition.
If your deceased relative was employed, then the lost earnings of that person are another form of economic damages. Depending on how long the time period was between the wrongful death incident and the decedent’s death, if the decedent was unable to work, then lost income is fairly straightforward to calculate.
Future lost wages are also negotiable in settlement. These may be more contentious based on how the attorneys hammer out how long the decedent might have lived and worked in the absence of early death and how much increased income value the decedent may have accrued based on expected additional training, education, and promotions over time.
Your lost family member’s contributions to you and other immediate family members are not confined to what that person earned or could have earned in income. These contributions can also include more intangible things like household services, emotional support, love and affection, and spousal consortium.
These kinds of losses to you are known as non-economic or indirect damages. They are generally impossible to evidence through bills or receipts, but they are real and compensable in a wrongful death lawsuit. Accordingly, your plaintiff’s lawyer in settlement negotiations should include a demand that you be compensated for them in any settlement.
Similar to the loss of the deceased’s contributions and companionship, the emotional distress you experience because of the mental trauma of losing a loved one is a form of non-economic harm that a court could include in your damages if you prevail in a wrongful death lawsuit. Therefore, these forms of harm should be included in the settlement your attorney negotiates.
Punitive damages are not always allowable in a wrongful death lawsuit, and they are not always part of a wrongful death lawsuit payout. But if your attorney can demonstrate that the defendant’s actions during the wrongful death incident were intentional or reckless, like drunk driving that led to a fatal accident, then an argument is possible that the settlement amount should factor in a punitive component.
Not all wrongful death defendants are equal. Your lawyer’s settlement approach should consider the defendant’s ability to pay any agreed-upon settlement sum.
For example, if the defendant was acting in the course of employment during the wrongful death incident, then in a wrongful death lawsuit, the employer could be named as a third-party defendant. That employer and its insurer can also be brought into settlement negotiations to contribute their fair share.
If the defendant is a business, such as a company that maintained unsafe premises that led to your loved one’s fatal injuries or a product manufacturer that designed or built a product that was inherently unsafe and caused those fatal injuries, these kinds of defendants may have “deeper pockets” to pay a settlement than an individual might have.
On the other end of this spectrum, if the defendant acted alone, is elderly, lives off of a fixed income source like Social Security, and has few assets available, like bank accounts or property that can be liquidated to pay damages, it may not be practical to pursue a high-end settlement amount.
An essential part of your attorney’s trial or settlement negotiation preparation is to identify all possible contributors to the harm your loved one suffered and what they have in assets to pay a judgment award or settlement amount.
Finally, in any personal injury action, including a wrongful death claim, you should be prepared for the defendant’s attorneys to raise the affirmative defense that your loved one was not a “faultless victim.”
They will often argue that, in at least some small way, your deceased family member also did something negligent that contributed to the harm he or she suffered and that any settlement amount should be reduced to the degree of that contributory fault.
Arizona is a comparative fault state. What this means is that if your wrongful death claim goes to trial, and the defendant proves that your loved one was partly at fault for causing the wrongful death harm, then the court will reduce your judgment award by a percentage equal to your deceased family member’s percentage of fault. In settlement negotiations, the defendant’s attorneys will look for ways to apply this principle to reduce your settlement payout.
Our treatment of the factors above that go into negotiating a wrongful death settlement is not meant to be exhaustive, but it should give you a sense of how much settlement amounts can vary based on the circumstances of each specific claim and how important it is to have an experienced wrongful death attorney to represent you in negotiations or at trial if negotiations fail.
Not all of these factors may apply to your claim for the wrongful death of your loved one and not all of the factors may apply with equal weight. This is why the “average” settlement may be in the low six figures or worth millions of dollars.
There is no way for your lawyer to tell you what your claim is worth before investigating the evidence, identifying everyone who may be liable, determining what assets they have, including insurance coverage, and considering any defenses they may raise, like comparative fault. To attempt to do so would be irresponsible and could lead to unrealistic expectations, which could cause you even more emotional trauma.
A wrongful death settlement can never make up for the loss of your loved one, but it can help provide your family with financial support at this difficult time.
If you believe you have a wrongful death claim, call Stone Rose Law at (480) 498-8998 or contact us online to begin a free consultation with a Phoenix wrongful death attorney.
