The honest answer in week one is that nobody knows. That answer is unsatisfying enough that a good deal of the industry gives a different one, which is how people end up disappointed eighteen months later.

What the number is made of

Three parts. The first is what has been spent and lost already: treatment, wages, the shifts you could not take. This part is documented and rarely argued about, and it is usually the smallest.

The second is what is still to come. Future treatment, future earning capacity, the work you can no longer do. This is where medical opinion does the heavy lifting and where most of the disagreement lives.

The third is the part with no receipt: pain, the loss of ordinary things, what the injury has done to the shape of your life. It is real and it is compensable, and it is the part an adjuster will discount hardest.

What actually moves it

Liability that is not seriously in dispute. Records that are early, continuous and specific. A treating doctor who can say what the future looks like. Available insurance — a catastrophic injury against a minimum policy is a hard, unfair fact. And whether the other side believes the file will actually be run if they do not pay.

Why the first offer is low

Because it is made before the second and third parts are known, and because a proportion of people accept it. That is the whole strategy. Across the last three years, the cases we resolved settled at roughly nine times the insurer's opening offer.