Personal Injury Law

Progressive Insurance Claims

I almost universally like Progressive insurance adjusters. Progressive's claims adjusters seem nicer, more professional, and less inclined to take cases personally than a lot of other insurance companies. I can say the same thing about Progressive's lawyers. Most are decent, straight shooters and good lawyers.

I've fully exhausted the list of nice things I can say about dealing with Progressive. This insurance company just does not make fair settlement offers in car accident cases. I believe that in a given case if you could line up all of the insurance companies and ask each one to make an offer based on their evaluation of the injuries from a car accident, Progressive would give the lowest settlement offer on that case. I also think Progressive would be the first to deny liability in an accident case.

Why does Progressive do this? Largely because it often has so little to lose. My theory with Progressive is that it tries to compete on the Internet for car insurance buyers fighting hard for the lowest price. These are often the same buyers who are not willing to set their liability insurance limits at a reasonable amount. When you trademark the phase "Name Your Price" in selling insurance, you are probably not selling a ton of coverage. So with its small insurance policies, often $20,000 in Maryland, Progressive can stick its neck out knowing that, in the end, it can fold before trial and their exposure is limited.

For example, we have one tough case where a man's life was pretty much destroyed by a car accident in Ocean City. It is a rear end accident, he only has around $20,000 in medical bills but he needs a future surgery. So what is Progressive's settlement offer in the case? $5,400.

So Progressive hires its own expert to say the guy is not hurt, right? Actually, no. Progressive's own expert did an "independent" medical exam and found that all of the medical bills were related and agrees that all of the treatment was necessary. Don't take my word for it, this is the defense expert Progressive hired in the case. (Here is a redacted copy of Progressive's doctor's independent medical exam.) I think it is beyond ridiculous that this expert suggests that half of his surgery should be attributed to his preexisting condition because he had "mild degeneration of the cervical spine" before the accident. But even if all of the plaintiffs' treating doctors get the Ebola virus, even if Progressive's expert becomes our expert, our recovery at trial is going to be far, far in excess of Progressive's policy limits.

Progressive has a small in-house defense firm in Maryland and does not have the resources (I should say has not set aside the resources - Progressive has lots of resources) to wage war with plaintiffs' lawyers throughout Maryland. So Progressive will often increase their settlement offers substantially after a lawsuit is filed. In this case, Progressive has rung up a lot of legal bills but will still have to settle the case for the policy limits. It would have saved Progressive a lot of litigation costs to properly evaluate this case at the outset.

Full post as published by Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog on May 24, 2010 (boomark / email).