A potential client sat across from me a few years ago describing an accident, a rear end collision on the freeway, and asked a question I hear often in one form or another: what is my case worth.
I gave her an honest range based on the facts in front of me, a range lower than she expected. I watched her face change, and I understood why. She had spoken with another attorney the week before who quoted a number nearly triple what I believed her case realistically supported.
I did not get her as a client. I think about her occasionally, and I stand by what I told her.
Some attorneys build their intake process around telling potential clients what they want to hear. A high number during the first meeting feels good in the moment and makes signing a retainer easier. I understand the business logic behind this, and I reject it in my own practice.
Here is why.
An inflated early estimate sets expectations a real case often cannot meet. When settlement negotiations begin months later grounded in medical records, wage documentation, and the honest strengths and weaknesses of a claim, the gap between what a client was told and what the evidence supports becomes the client’s problem to absorb, not the attorney’s, who created the gap in the first place.
I have represented clients who came to me after another attorney had built expectations neither the facts nor the law supported. Watching someone process the difference between a number they were promised and a number the evidence justifies is one of the harder parts of this work, and it is entirely avoidable.
Honesty at the outset does not mean pessimism. Cases evolve. New evidence, additional treatment, and a clearer long term medical picture often increase the value of a claim well past an early estimate. When this happens, clients experience it as good news rather than a correction to expectations set too high from the beginning.
I also tell clients when a case has real weaknesses. If liability is contested, I say so. If a gap in medical treatment might give an insurance company grounds to argue an injury was unrelated to the accident, I explain this directly rather than waiting for it to surface as a surprise during negotiations. Clients deserve to make decisions about their own case with complete information, not a version edited to sound more encouraging.
This approach costs me clients sometimes. People occasionally choose the attorney offering the bigger number during a first meeting, and I accept this outcome as part of doing business honestly in a field where honesty is not always rewarded right away.
What I gain in return is a practice built on trust holding up over the full length of a case, not only during the meeting where a retainer gets signed. Clients who hear the truth from day one tend to make better decisions about settlement offers, medical treatment, and their own timelines, because they work from an accurate picture rather than a hopeful one.
Personal injury law involves enough uncertainty already, medical outcomes, insurance company decisions, the unpredictable pace of litigation. An attorney’s estimate of a case’s value should not add another layer of uncertainty on top of it. I would rather give a client a number they trust than a number designed only to get them through the door.
The same principle applies to timelines, an area where I see other firms stretch the truth almost as often as they do with settlement figures. Telling a client their case will resolve in a few months, when the honest answer depends on treatment still ahead and an insurance company known for slow responses, sets up frustration unrelated to how well the case is handled. I would rather tell a client upfront a case involving ongoing medical treatment often takes a year or longer to resolve properly than watch this same client grow anxious and distrustful three months in, wondering why nothing has resolved yet.
Clients hire an attorney to guide them through something unfamiliar and often frightening. Guidance built on comfortable fiction eventually collapses under the weight of the real facts. Guidance built on honesty, even the uncomfortable parts, holds up for as long as a case lasts, and this difference is worth more to my clients than a number sounding better on the day we met.
Author Bio
Ashley Aframian is the founder and lead attorney of Highway Law Group, a Los Angeles personal injury, employment law, and insurance bad faith firm dedicated to helping accident victims and workers hurt on the job move through the legal system with confidence and compassion. Ashley built her practice around giving injured people direct, personal attention through what is often the hardest stretch of their lives, handling the insurance companies and the legal process so her clients are free to focus on healing. Learn more at HighwayLawGroup.com.
