How is pain and suffering calculated?

There’s a reason this question is so common: it feels like there should be a formula. A chart. A multiplier. Something clean and predictable.

But human beings don’t live in formulas.

“Pain and suffering” is insurance-company language. It’s a narrow doorway for something that’s much larger: the way a collision rearranges a life. Your sleep, your patience, your joy, your routines, the way your body moves, the way you feel in traffic, the way you wake up in the morning — the thousand tiny moments that make you you.

Those aren’t numbers.

They’re human details.

And human details don’t get calculated — they get felt.

A jury doesn’t assign value by doing math.

A jury assigns value by seeing someone. By recognizing harm that could just as easily have happened to them or someone they love. By hearing a story that rings true in their bones.

My job isn’t to say “this injury is worth X.”

My job is to learn who you were before and who you are now, to gather the moments that matter, and to weave those moments into a story that jurors can step inside. A story where they recognize what was lost — and what justice requires.

And here’s the part the insurance companies don’t talk about:

When jurors see a whole human story, the number they choose is almost always bigger than anything an adjuster would ever plug into a formula. Because people don’t think in spreadsheets. They think in fairness. They think in multiples of whatever the insurance company imagined.