You’ve suffered an injury and exploring the possibility of legal action to reclaim your financial losses. But you’re also not someone who relishes the prospect of court battles or even long, drawn out legal processes. So to mentally prepare yourself, you wonder—what’s a reasonable personal injury lawsuit timeline?
We’d like to give you an easy answer, and we could just say that cases typically take 1-2 years from the time they are filed, depending on your state. But how your specific case plays out will depend on a number of factors unique to your case and one X-factor in particular.
Maximum Medical Improvement
This is the biggest X-factor in any personal injury lawsuit timeline. At the core of your lawsuit is the dollar amount you’re requesting and that’s all based on how much you lost due to the injury. No one can know what that is until you’re either healed or at least recovered enough to resume participation in life. At that point, an assessment of the damages can be made and requested by your attorney. This is know as the MMI—the point of Maximum Medical Improvement.
The need for MMI underscores how different everyone’s case is. Not only are the injuries different, but each person’s ability to tolerate being without settlement income is different. A person strapped for cash may have to settle before the MMI point, even if that means taking a smaller dollar amount.
Furthermore, because MMI and the settlement discussions that pertain to it happen before a lawsuit is formally filed, they aren’t included in any average timeline of how long such a case takes to make its way through the system.
MMI isn’t the only X-factor in a personal injury lawsuit case. The need for expert witness testimony is different and the case load the court faces will be a factor. All of which makes predicting a timeline a tricky endeavor.