There is no set amount, and anyone who gives you a number before reading your medical records is guessing. What you recover depends on what the crash cost you, what Louisiana law allows, and how much insurance money is actually there to reach.
The last one surprises people most. A severe injury behind a small policy and a moderate injury behind a large one can land in the same place.
For what counts as a loss you can claim, we set out the categories on our car accident page. This page is about the things that decide the size of the number.
Can the other driver’s insurance cap what you recover?
Often, yes, and this is the hardest conversation we have.
If the driver who hit you carries a small policy, that policy is usually the practical ceiling on what you can collect from them, no matter how badly you were hurt. Suing a driver personally for the difference sounds satisfying and rarely produces money, because most people who carry minimum coverage do not have assets behind it.
What changes that is your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage. It sits behind the other driver’s policy and pays when theirs runs out or never existed. Whether you bought it can matter more than any other fact in your file, and most people are not sure whether they have it.
Finding every layer of available coverage is part of the work. There is sometimes more than one policy: a second vehicle in your household, an employer’s policy if anyone was working, or a commercial policy behind a driver who was on the job.
What if you were partly at fault?
Louisiana changed this rule in 2026, and the change is significant enough that a lot of what you will read online about it is now out of date.
We keep a current, dated explanation here: if you were partly at fault in a Louisiana accident. Read that one rather than trusting a general answer, including ours from memory.
Why the first offer is built by software
Blase spent twelve years defending insurance companies before he started representing injured people. The first offer is not an evaluation of your life. It is an opening position, and on most files it comes out of a program that reads your diagnosis codes and your treatment dates.
That program rewards continuous treatment and penalizes gaps. It has no field for the fact that you cannot lift your youngest anymore, or that you stopped sleeping through the night, or that you took the desk job because you could not do the other one.
Adjusters are trained to put that number in front of you early, while you are worried about your car and your job and the bills are arriving. Knowing how it was built is the difference between negotiating and accepting.
What a gap in treatment does to your claim
If you stop treating for a few months and then go back, the file now contains a story the other side will tell: you got better, then something else happened.
That is usually not what occurred. People stop because of childcare, or work, or a copay they cannot cover, or because they were told to wait for a referral. None of those reasons appear in the record unless someone puts them there. If you have to pause, tell your doctor why, and make sure it is written down.
Should you settle before you finish treating?
Almost never. Signing a release closes the claim, including for the surgery your doctor has not recommended yet.
The honest difficulty is that finishing treatment takes time and the bills do not wait. That tension is real and it is worth talking through with someone before you sign, not after.
Questions people ask us
Does a settlement cover future medical care?
It can, when it is documented. Future care has to be supported by your treating doctors rather than estimated, which is one reason the medical record matters more than the demand letter.
I hurt the same shoulder years ago. Does that end my claim?
No. A prior injury to the same body part is common and does not disqualify you, though it changes how the claim is built and proved. We explain that here.
What if the driver who hit me had no insurance at all?
Then your own uninsured motorist coverage becomes the claim, and the company you have been paying premiums to is the company on the other side of it. That catches people off guard.
Talk to us before you accept a number
If you were hurt in a crash in Lafayette or anywhere in Acadiana, we will look at your file and give you a straight read, including telling you when we think you do not need a lawyer. Call or send a message and we will come back to you the same day.
No fee unless we win.
