How Insurance Calculates Your Rear-End Settlement (And Why the Number Is Always Low)

Marcus was driving home on US-30 just outside of Fort Wayne when it happened. He was stopped at a red light, no warning, a pickup truck slammed into the back of his truck, but the damage from that looked pretty minor, just a cracked bumper and a small dent. The insurance adjuster called within 48 hours, was very friendly, and offered Marcus $4,200 to settle the case. Marcus thought, you know, clear liability, definitely not my fault, not much damage, it's easy money. Six months later, he was in physical therapy, and his attorney told him his case was worth many times the amount what he had settled for. Here's the truth. That adjuster wasn't being friendly, he was doing his job. And today we're going to show you exactly why rear-end cases can be worth much more than the insurance company wants you to believe, and how they use the clear liability story to lowball you even before you know what hits you. So, Chris, why is liabilities on these types of cases just the starting point for how to get them resolved? So a lot of the rear-end cases, our clients, they're just sitting there, stop sign or stop light, minding their own business, and they get rear-ended. And you would think that it's a, okay, this is a clear case of liability. However, in Indiana, there is no presumption of fault. Fault is a question for a jury, and so the common mistake is, hey, the other person's at fault, their insurance is going to cover everything. The second mistake would be the insurance that we get as motorists here in Indiana is liability insurance, which means prove that they are at fault, and then the insurance company will make a one-time lump sum offer for you. So a lot of our clients, they come in, or potential clients, and they sit down and say, I got a clear case for you. This should be a slam dunk. This one's super easy. Hey, I was stopping at a stop light, this guy rear-ended me, and I went to the hospital, had a little bit of PT, and I think the insurance company's paying my bills already. So I just want to check in with you and see what you think this case is worth. And Chad and I will kind of take a step back and go, oh, the insurance company's paying for your bills, so you just want to know what the case is worth. When realistically, the insurance company's not paying for the bills, they're evaluating what the case might be worth. They're quick to offer nominal amounts to try to get the case resolved in the first week, first day. Try to get the case settled before you really start experiencing some bigger injuries. And so that's where these quick liability or these quick settlement offers can come back to bite you is because you think they're taking responsibility. The insurance company's called up and said, hey, this is all our fault. We're really sorry this happened, and for your inconvenience, we want to offer you a little bit of money. And the new strategy we see now is we're going to offer you some money for your inconvenience, but also we'll pay for another $2,000, $3,000. State Farm even says we'll pay for another $15,000 worth of medical bills if you incur those bills and if you incur them within a certain period of time. I, for one, wouldn't want to take $700 for my inconvenience if I was going to go through another $15,000 worth of medical treatment. Because frankly, they're going to pay for that anyway, and so there's no sense in rushing into it. Where these insurance adjusters are really, really good is convincing folks that they don't have much of a claim because, you know, this wasn't a huge impact. And a lot of property damage. Yeah, look at the car. There's not a lot of damage to it. So therefore, this is how these claims resolve. This is, hey, this is how it resolves, and so you should just take it now rather than you don't want to get a lawyer involved. They're just going to take some of your settlement. They're going to take some of your settlement, but typically a much bigger one. And so because we're going to get to the proper value, and the proper value usually happens at the proper time, and it's not within the first three days or usually even three weeks after your accident. Yeah, one of the things that, I mean, we're personal injury attorneys, but what we're not or haven't even discussed in this video is property damage. So the adjusters are trained to kind of convey to the claims or the people that are injured is, hey, we'll get your car fixed. We'll get this taken care of, or if the car is totaled, we'll get you a fair market value for your car really quick, and then they'll move into the injury side of things. So their duty, if you will, is to, they're insured, but the really good adjusters are good at making it seem as, yeah, I'm with the insurance company. We're going to take care of everything. Oh, and by the way, this doesn't look like a tremendously big case. There's not a lot of damage here to the cars. Were you hurt? Okay, did you get checked out? I'll tell you what, we'll offer, like you said, $4,000 and we'll pay for your ER visit. Oh, and if you go to the doctor in the next week, we'll pay for that too. There's a sales element to it, and it can be attractive, especially if you're sitting there and you're like, well, I don't, I'm a little sore, but I'm not, I think I'm okay. But you don't want to put yourself in a position, especially when you have time on your side, you've got two years in Indiana, you don't need to settle quickly. Let's talk about soft tissue injuries and uses that a lot. It's a buzzword. Yeah, soft tissue. It's a phrase I probably really generated from the insurance side of things where they call what you're going through after a rear-end collision, soft tissue, because hey, if it's soft tissue, really, it's not that bad. Well, the fact is, what it really refers to is you just didn't break any bones. Rear-end collision causes you, when you're sitting there, to go back into your seat. It shoves the car out from under you. So you go back into your seat and then you fly forward and then you come back again and your spine is now whipping. It's this whiplash. Your spine is not designed to do that. And so sometimes you'd get that and you get better in two or three weeks. Sometimes you just never get better. Sometimes it takes somewhere in between that. But these are the types of cases that insurance companies have put a lot of resources into learning how to defend. It's because this is the thing that happens more often than not. Most of our clients do not have broken bones. They have sore necks and backs. And so you're talking about millions and billions of dollars of spent on the insurance company side, figuring out how to defend these and resolve these cases for less than they should be. And so that's where attorneys, we've obviously created our strategies for pursuing them to combat the defenses that you're going to see. And so with any case, getting to the right value is all about proving the value. And so what types of things are you looking at when you're looking at a rear end collision in terms of damages or the monetary measure of what you went through? Damages aren't going to change whether it's a rear end collision or a failure to yield or a slip and fall. The damage is pretty much spelled out in Indiana. And what is going to change is, like Chad said, how the defense is going to defend these types of cases. So I always want to point to the fact that there's, you know, it's a soft tissue injury. There's no broken bones. There's nothing objective there. Or the average person should have healed within five weeks, six weeks. So what they'll do is they'll hire their own doctors to come to that conclusion or reach that conclusion. The lawyer's job is to really, you can't judge a book by the cover. And so just because it looks like this on its face, our job is to kind of get into the meat and potatoes and develop the storyline. And so we do that by really, one, working with our own clients to figure out exactly what they went through, how this impacted them. We call that the loss of quality of life. It's not just, I didn't lose something, but it can be my life was different for a period of time. My life was more difficult. If you're married, your spouse had to help maybe around the house or do different things. Finally, finally. Yeah. My gosh, I've been trying to get my husband to do the dishes for 25 years. But the paying the picture and telling the story really starts with our clients and their story. And then from there further, it can involve consulting with different experts and even the treating physicians to figure out, okay, really what's really going on here. Defense always wants to point to things like degenerative disc disease or hey, your kid's 50, doesn't look 50, but he's got degeneration in his spine. So Chad was in an accident. He's at hurt because of the accident. He's hurt because he's got a 50 year old spine. Well, I know Chad and Chad does not have a bad back. He's very active. Never goes to the doctor. So this brings in what we call credibility witnesses. So you go to trial and you can have people testify on your behalf saying those types of things. Do you remember the question? I do. And we're talking about damages. But to get to damages, you got to talk a little bit about developing that storyline. So simple answer, out-of-pocket medical expenses, reimbursement for your medical bills, lost wages, loss of earnings capacity, permanent injury, permanent scarring, loss of future earnings capacity, and then pain and suffering. Yeah, and so some of those are, you see a statement from your medical provider and see exactly how much those damages are. The ones we focus on, obviously, if somebody has ongoing injuries, that's the real value of your claim is how it impacted your life. So the things that can hurt the value of your claim is if you're creating problems for yourself, like not following doctor's orders. So they say, hey, don't do any landscaping. And then sure enough, you're out in the yard throwing landscaping stone around and there's an insurance adjuster or investigator over there taking pictures of you doing it. Obviously, follow doctor's orders. Don't create gaps in your treatment. And so if you need to go to the doctor, go. A lot of us, Chris just said, Chad never goes to the doctor. Well, partially because I don't want to go to the doctor, right? And so after an accident is not the time to grin and bear it. You might think that's, hey, that's just what I always do. If you continue to have problems after your accident and you haven't treated for it, especially if you're 50, believe me, your diagnostics of your neck, if they ever take a picture of the inside of your neck, it's going to show some level of degeneration. Even if you didn't have problems before, it's going to. And so insurance companies say, gosh, you didn't treat for six months after the accident. You must not have been that hurt. When in reality you were hurt, but you're a knucklehead and you just thought, ah, it'll be fine. And then six months later, it's still not fine. So then you finally go to the doctor. So don't create a gap in treatment. Don't create extra easy defenses for the insurance by ignoring what your doctor is telling you to do or not do. And that's going to help us paint the picture of what actually happened. The medical records tell that story. You have to treat. I got a good story about a client who had a work restriction of 50 pounds. So he had a pretty legitimate back injury. And the doctor wrote off work slips, which by the way, sometimes those are chewing hard and you can't find them. Our clients will say, well, I didn't, I missed work. Or did the doctor write you an off work slip? Did the doctor tell you the off work? And sometimes we don't get that, that evidence. So we actually have that evidence here. We had the work restriction. And unfortunately for my client, he was in a job where the job description in and of itself who hired him to routinely lift 50 to 75 pounds and on occasion lift more than that 75 to a hundred pounds. And so the defense and litigation subpoenaed my client's employee file, as well as the manual, all the documents with his employer and got that. And then my guy, he did miss work for a period of time, but he went back to work. And so then there was the storyline of, well, are you really that hurt when the job duty says you need to be able to do this and this, and you only missed two or three days and then you went back to work and he kept treating and treating and treating. So it became a question of fact, which at the end of the day, it's all about credibility with our clients because the defense is going to have. So they don't have the burden of proof. So their job is much easier to just poke holes in a case. And our job is harder because we have to establish and prove the elements of negligence. But simple remedy is the more truthful you are, the more credible you are, the more consistent you are following doctor's orders, the easier it is for us to paint that picture. Yeah. I get clients say, well, my doctor told me not to work, but I also need to feed my family. My advice as the lawyer is always, you got to follow doctor's orders. I give them the, Hey, if you don't, and the insurance company is going to find out about it and it's going to hurt the value of your claim. But also as a dad, I understand you've got a future family. And so sometimes we do have clients who ignore the doctor's orders, not because they're trying to create some case where one didn't exist, but because the reality is their life caused it. So we started this video talking about how clear cut rear end cases are in terms of liability. And they're not. Yeah, they're not. And so I've had many clients tell me, well, I was rear ended. So therefore it's automatically by law, the other person's fault. And that is simply not true. Every accident is looked at through the lens of comparative fault, meaning we're going to look at what the defendant did. We're going to look at what the plaintiff did and determine was there negligence by committed by either one of them, meaning where they, did they not act how a reasonable driver would act. And then we compare those to see who's more at fault. And typically in a rear end collision, the person who does the rear ending is going to be primarily, if not 100% at fault. But don't just assume that you win the case because you got rear ended. I think that those cases we've all heard about people who are going out there trying to cause accidents, getting in front of a bigger vehicle and slamming on their brakes. I don't know why you would ever do that, but it's happened. I don't think I've ever had a client do that, but you hear about this happening in bigger cities. There might be some element of fault for the person that rear ended, but the person in front is at fault for that accident. They tried to cause it. And so it's not always automatic. I actually tried a case in Grant County and it was a rear end case. And my client came in, hey, I was rear ended. It's a clear case. Oh, we'll take a look at it. And that being a back surgery case, tried to get in State Farm. Well, the story went, my client said she was stopped at the stop sign and was rear ended. The defendant testified that my client was stopped at the stop sign and then moved forward and then stopped. And in between that, he started to accelerate too. And that's when he rear ended her. There were no witnesses. So it became a, he said, she said. And ultimately the jury came back and I forget the percentage, but they found my client 20%. It was 30%. Was it 30? It was 30%. 30%. Which is nuts. But it is nuts. But yeah. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it's completely, all these rear end accidents are completely avoidable if the motorist is paying attention to what's in front of them. And being a good, observant, reasonably prudent driver. But the jury felt that my client contributed in some fashion, gave her 30%. So it reduced her verdict by 30%. So you can't just think that they're clear. What that means though, is why these cases have more value is simply because a tactic by insurance companies, usually before lawyers get involved is quick phone call. Hey, this looks like something simple. We're going to take care of you. We'll take care of the car. We'll take care of your medical bills. Here's something for your inconvenience. Don't we say that? Something for your inconvenience. Then we'll tack on whatever, 3,000 for general damages. And so ultimately they want to lock you in really quick before you go talk to a lawyer, talk to your friends, whoever, and learn. Or before you even treat. Before you, yeah, before you treat. And so the vast majority of our clients, we do handle some simpler treat release, but I'd say the vast majority of these types of cases, they're treating for probably 30 to 90 days. Well, if you settle within the first week, the value of your case could have been much higher had you not settled. If you want to understand the full playbook that the other side is running against you, watch our video on the five secrets that insurance adjusters pray that you don't know. And we're going to link it on the screen. But if you've ever been rear-ended in Indiana, I want to talk through your situation. Reach out to our law firm, Blackburn Roaming. The consultation is free. And knowing what your case is actually worth costs you nothing. So we'll see you over at the next video.