What Affects Your Claims Value

No tool can value your claim, and any that offers to is guessing at things it cannot know — your medical records, what insurance exists, and what fault argument the other side will make.

What this does instead: walk through the variables that actually move the number, so you can see where your own situation sits. Work down it and note where you land.

1. What it cost, and what it will cost

The foundation, and the part most often underestimated.

Present costs are on your expense tracker.

Future costs are where dog bite claims separate from each other. Scar revision surgery is frequently staged over years, and the cost of a course of revisions can exceed everything spent in the first month. A claim valued on today’s bills alone is undervalued.

→ Do you know yet whether you need further treatment? If not, it is too early to settle.

2. Scarring, and where it is

Permanent visible scarring is valued separately from the cost of treating it, and location changes it enormously. Face, neck and hands sit very differently from a shoulder or thigh.

→ Do you have photographs from the first days? If not, that value is already harder to prove.

3. The age of the person bitten

A scar on a growing child changes over years, revision is staged into adulthood, and the horizon of impact is a lifetime rather than a decade.

Under Florida law a child under six also has a structural advantage: the “Bad Dog” sign defense does not apply to them at all.

4. Work and earning capacity

Time off is straightforward. The larger question is whether the injury changes what you can do long term — a hand injury to someone who works with their hands is not the same claim as the identical injury to someone who does not.

5. Psychological effect

Real, and routinely undercounted because nobody writes it down. Fear that reshapes where you walk, whether you visit friends, or whether a child plays outside is part of the claim — but documented treatment supports it and undocumented distress is far harder to value.

→ Is any of it in a medical record?

This is where Florida claims most often lose value.

Section 767.04 reduces the owner’s liability by your percentage of fault. And since 2023, a victim found more than 50% at fault may recover nothing at all.

→ Is there any argument you contributed? If so, that is the fight, and it is worth understanding before you speak to an adjuster.

7. Was a sign posted?

If a conforming “Bad Dog” sign was displayed, the statute may bar the claim entirely — subject to exceptions that matter a great deal, including the under-six carve-out.

→ Do you have a photograph of it, from where you were standing?

8. The ceiling nobody mentions: the policy limit

This usually matters more than everything above it.

Most dog bite claims are paid by a homeowners or renters policy. A claim is worth what can actually be collected. Against a $100,000 limit, value above that limit is theoretical unless there are other policies or other assets.

→ Which policies might respond — the owner’s, a landlord’s, a property manager’s, a business’s, an umbrella above any of them? Why this is the first thing to investigate.

9. Liens coming out of the back end

Your health insurer, Medicare or Medicaid, or a provider may have a right to be repaid from your recovery. That does not reduce what you can claim, but it changes what you keep.

Where that leaves you

If you worked through those and the honest answers are “serious injury, ongoing treatment, little or no fault argument, and a policy behind it” — that is a substantial claim.

If they are “healed cleanly, no scar, no time off, and a real argument you contributed” — it may genuinely not be worth pursuing, and you should expect a lawyer to tell you so.

No result is guaranteed and past results in other cases do not predict yours. What a first conversation can usefully do is identify which policies exist, where the fault argument will come from, and what to photograph today.