My take on Minor Impact claims.

June 30, 2008 by Zale.

I believe that I’m a bit of an authority on this topic. Why? I specialized in Minor Impact claims for both Allstate and Safeco. I’ve probably had some degree of involvement in thousands of these. There is an interesting two part news story by Anderson Cooper on the practices of Allstate and State Farm regarding minor impact claims. The story is worth watching, even though I’m not a big CNN fan.

I do not completely agree with the story, because there are a lot of folks who are trying to perpetrate fraud on the insurance industry. The story does not address that issue well. The problem is that there are some people who are truly hurt in their minor accident. The hard part is separating the liars from the fragile.

As an Adjuster, I believe that I developed a knack for picking out the liars, unfortunately, many adjusters never take the time to find the signs of a hard impact, such as dimples in the back cab of a pickup truck (indicating that the impact was hard enough to move the bed of the truck and damage the back of the truck’s cab) or damage occurring to an area that transfers energy as opposed to absorbing it (like a steel truck bumper, which transfers the impact throughout the vehicle vs. a composite car bumper, which isolates the forces and keeps them from traveling to the occupants compartment).

Ultimately, the jury system may still be the place for most of these cases to be decided. I like the fact that we can still “let the people decide” as opposed to letting some legislator decide.

Posted in Litigation, Injury Law, Insurance Practices, Insurance Law | No Comments »