What is in the database
The database contains approximately 3,000 real personal injury settlements and jury verdicts compiled from public sources and verified attorney submissions.
- All 50 US states and the District of Columbia
- Years 1973 to 2026
- Practice areas: car accident, truck accident, motorcycle, pedestrian, bicycle, premises liability, slip and fall, medical malpractice, workplace injury, bus accident, and other
- Injury types: back, broken bones, burns, knee, shoulder, soft tissue, spinal cord, traumatic brain injury, whiplash, wrongful death, and other
- Result types: jury verdicts and settlements
Where the data comes from
Every record is sourced from a public document, an open data feed, or a verified attorney submission. We retain a source citation on every record and a source URL wherever one exists.
- Published court opinions
- State and federal court opinions retrieved from CourtListener, a project of the Free Law Project. We extract case captions, dollar outcomes, and source URLs from opinion text.
- Federal civil dockets (RECAP)
- Federal PACER docket records mirrored into the RECAP archive.
- Verified attorney submissions
- Practicing attorneys submit case results through our public submission form. Each submission is reviewed before it appears in the database.
- Public legal news and trade publications
- Law360, Lexology, JD Supra, Justia, state bar publications, and mainstream news coverage of personal injury cases with publicly disclosed outcomes.
- State court bulk civil records
- Open civil judgment data from state court systems that publish bulk feeds. The current expansion source is Virginia's open District Court civil records, which contribute coverage of routine sub-$25,000 outcomes. Additional state systems are evaluated on a rolling basis.
- Aggregate reference statistics
- For context, we separately maintain a curated set of authoritative reference statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Insurance Research Council, NCCI, the National Practitioner Data Bank, and Jury Verdict Research. These power population-level averages used by the calculator and are not mixed into the case-row database.
How we categorize each record
Every record is normalized into the same schema regardless of source. This is what we capture on each row.
| Field | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| state | Yes | US state where the case was filed or resolved. |
| injuryType | Yes | Primary injury category (back, broken bones, burns, knee, shoulder, soft tissue, spinal cord, TBI, whiplash, wrongful death, other). |
| practiceArea | Yes | Primary case category (car accident, truck accident, motorcycle, pedestrian, bicycle, premises liability, slip and fall, medical malpractice, workplace injury, bus accident, other). |
| amount | Yes | Gross monetary outcome in US dollars. |
| resultType | Yes | Whether the outcome was a jury verdict or a settlement. |
| year | Yes | Year the case was settled or decided. |
| description | Yes | Narrative summary of the case facts and outcome. |
| source | Yes | Where the record came from (see sources table above). |
| caseTitle | Optional | Case caption when publicly available. |
| county | Optional | County where the case was filed, when available. |
| sourceUrl | Optional | Public URL where the case outcome can be independently verified. |
| amountIsBinned, amountMin, amountMax | Optional | Used when a source releases dollar ranges rather than exact amounts (for example, NPDB malpractice payment bands). |
| severity, natureOfSuit, practitionerType | Optional | Specialized fields used by bulk civil court and federal medical malpractice sources. |
| submittedByFirm, submittedByWebsite, submittedBy | Optional | Submitter information for verified attorney submissions. |
What is not in the database
- Cases without a publicly disclosed dollar outcome.
- Criminal verdicts, contract disputes, and non-personal-injury civil cases.
- Confidential settlements that were never made public.
- Cases where the outcome cannot be traced back to a public source or a verified attorney submission.
Known limitations and biases
Public legal sources skew toward larger and publicly disclosed outcomes. Routine and confidential small settlements rarely enter the public record, because most personal injury settlements are private agreements with no court filing requirement. Historically, this meant average amounts in our database ran higher than national averages reported by the Insurance Research Council and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (national medians for closed bodily injury claims sit closer to $15,000 to $31,000, depending on year and methodology).
We are actively counter-weighting this skew by ingesting bulk civil court data and aggregate state-level reports that contribute coverage of routine and median-range outcomes. As that coverage expands, the database distribution moves closer to the underlying population of personal injury cases. The live source mix table above shows the current composition; expect the share of state civil court records to grow over time.
Treat this database as a directional reference for case comparison and not as a substitute for an attorney's case-value assessment. For a personalized estimate that accounts for jurisdiction, injury severity, and liability, use the SetCalc calculator.
Quality control
- Attorney submissions are manually reviewed before appearing in the public database. New submissions enter with an unapproved flag and require review.
- The submission endpoint is rate-limited to five submissions per IP address per hour.
- Source URLs are retained where available so readers can independently verify any case.
- The aggregated open-data feed at /api/verdicts/feed.json excludes bulk-volume aggregate datasets by default so the curated case-row database remains the public face of the data.
- Corrections, additions, and takedown requests: [email protected].
How to cite this data
The aggregated dataset feed is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Attribution is required. Individual case records may have additional source citations to respect (the underlying CourtListener, Law360, attorney submission, or court record source).
Cite this data
SetCalc. "Personal Injury Settlement and Verdict Database." Updated 2026-05-13. https://setcalc.com/personal-injury-settlements-and-verdicts. Accessed 2026-05-13.
Programmatic access
Researchers, journalists, and developers can access the database programmatically. See the developer API documentation for endpoint reference, query parameters, and example requests. The recommended endpoint for bulk use is the CC-BY-4.0 JSON-LD feed at /api/verdicts/feed.json.
Contact
Methodology questions, corrections, takedown requests, or media inquiries: [email protected].