You Are Not In Good Hands With Allstate
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We have all heard the Allstate Insurance Company slogan which is: “You are in good hands with Allstate”.
Those of us who fight Allstate Insurance Company on a regular basis and our clients who seek adequate awards from Allstate Insurance Company know that an experience with Allstate Insurance Company is anything but “good”.
Throughout an 18-month investigation into minor impact-soft-Tissue injury collisions CNN found that if a person were injured in a minor accident, chances were high that Allstate would “challenge your medical claim, offering you barely a fraction of your expenses.”
One of Allstate’s former lawyers admitted that Allstate’s strategy is to make fighting the company “so expensive and so time-consuming that lawyers would start refusing to help clients.”
During the early ‘90s Allstate Insurance Company hired management consultant giant McKinsey & Co. to help Allstate increase its profits.
McKinsey & Co. came up with a scheme that significantly increased Allstate’s profits by means of shortchanging claimants who sought inadequate recovery from injuries sustained in minor motor vehicle collisions.
At the direction of McKinsey & Co. Allstate installed a new claims handling system called Claims Core Process Design (CCPD). This system was put into place in 1995.
The major emphasis of CCPD was to pay less on claims by using rigid standardized methods such as Fast Track, Colossus, minor impact-soft tissue referrals and special investigative unit referrals and by discouraging legal representation.
By the use of Colossus, Allstate took away from the in-the-field claims adjusters the discretion to set the value of a claim. I instead, the facts arising out of the claim were fed into a computer program named Colossus. Colossus spit out the value of the claim in a cookbook fashion. This is the amount that Allstate stuck to in its negotiations with injured claimants.
Because litigation is expensive, Allstate knew that by making low ball offers to the claimants chances were good that these beaten down claimants would settle their claim for a small fraction of its true value. These hard-pressed claimants simply did not have the wherewithal and stamina to fight their claims in court.
Unfortunately, Allstate tactics of discouraging attorneys to help injured victims in these low impact cases proved to be very profitable. Sadly, many lawyers who were willing to take minor impact cases before the new McKinsey procedures were instituted now refuse to help these injured parties because Allstate made it too expensive for these lawyers to handle the cases. These lawyers found that the chances of their making any profit on these cases were so slim that they refused to handle the cases.
Fortunately, there are dedicated plaintiffs lawyers who are willing to take these cases.
However, these scorch-the-earth defense tactics employed by not only Allstate Insurance Company but State Farm, Nationwide and many other insurance companies, have taken their toll on the unfortunate personal injury victims who now find it even more difficult to obtain an adequate recovery for their injuries.