Progressive Insurance?

zaitcev said:
Actually, they won. And then, the greedy brother started to wage disgusting social media campaign to extract revenge.
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Not according to the article. How do you know that the family lost?

Progressive's in-house attorney Jeffrey R. Moffet assisted the defense.
During the trial, the driver was found to be negligent and the jury awarded the family $760,000 in damages.

The Fishers are still waiting for their money.
 
PPC1052 said:
This has nothing to do with tort reform. Contributory negligence is an archaic version of the common law. This is a left over relic, not a recent reform. We have contrib in our state, but only for claims against governmental entities. Governmental entities were not covered in the comparative fault act that covers your garden variety tort claims. Because they are not covered, the default negligence regime for governmental entities is the old contrib of the common law rather than the modern compartive fault.

Tort reform is more about caps on non-economic damages (pain and suffering type damges, and punitive damages) and loser pays cost shifting.
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I would respectfully disagree. People who support tort reform support the contributory negligence doctrine.

I'm sure that there have been attempts to introduce comparative negligence statutes in Maryland. Docs, insurance cos., etc. have fought and will fight tooth and nail to retain contributory negligence in Maryland:

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/07/23/prca0723.htm
 
Gary F said:
OK. You have simultaneously impressed and confused me. I guess it all boils down to on how thorough and fair are the fact checkers at the Daily Mail. I have been reading it for a while and they tend to correlate well with the U.S. press if that is worth anything.
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My appologies. Where did I lose you? Maybe I can help clarify. (No sarcasm intended here at all-- I know this stuff can be dense for those that don't deal with these issues everyday.)

As an aside (maybe this will clear things up a bit) I just took a quick look at Maryland case law, nothing exhaustive, and I am not a Maryland attorney. So this is not a legal opinion. Just an observation. But it looks like they have a statute similar to the one in my state, which I will get to in a second. First, some more background. In most states, if an insurance company pays their insured for damages the insured sustained caused by the negligence of another, the insurance company has a right of subrogation to sue the tortfeasor to get the money back that they paid. (Many on the board are famiiar with that with respect to damages to their plane.) A release signed by the insured releasing the tortfeasor will also act to release the claim of the insurance company in subrogation, because the insurer stands in the shoes of its policy holder. Consequently, most underinsured motorist policies require that the insured get the consent of the carrier before they can settle the claim with the tortfeasor. The insurance company will then say, hell no, you can't settle the claim, because you are defeating out subro claim, and we are getting nothing. So, that stops the insured from effectively settling with the tortfeasor, and everyone now has to go to trial to resolve all these issues. Now for the statute: As in my state, it looks like Maryland passed a statute which requires the underinsurance carrier to make a choice-- let the insured settle with the tortfeasor, and give up the right of subrogation, or to front the amount of the settlement offer by the tortfeasor. In my state, it has to be an offer of the tortfeasor's entire policy limits to trigger the mandate to front the money or essentially waive the subrogation right. (This makes sense, because the UIM claim doesn't attach until the liability limits are exhausted.) This allows the insured to get paid the amount of the tortfeasor's settlement offer one way or the other. So, that could be what happened here.

So how what happened in this case? I am not positive because I need to see the pleadings in the case. But it seems to me to be likely that the decedent's carrier simply allowed a policy limits settlement, and then was simply defending against the first party action for the underinsured benefits, which made it look they were defending the tortfeasor, when in reality, they were just defending the contract claim.
 
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TedR3 said:
I would respectfully disagree.
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Disagree if you wish. But that doesn't change history. The only thing that contrib and tort reform have in common is that they both reduce recovery (in most instances. There are some where contrib results in greater recovery). But there is no modern push to implement contrib. It's the opposite-- the push is to implement compartive fault. Your link actually shows what I said is true. It shows that contrib has been in existence for over 100 years, has been abandoned in all but a few jurisdictions, and there is a steady attack on it in those where it still exists. There is also a note that not a single jurisdiciton that has adopted compartive fault has gone back to contrib.
 
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PPC1052 said:
My appologies. Where did I lose you? Maybe I can help clarify. (No sarcasm intended here at all-- I know this stuff can be dense for those that don't deal with these issues everyday.)

As an aside (maybe this will clear things up a bit) I just took a quick look at Maryland case law, nothing exhaustive, and I am not a Maryland attorney. So this is not a legal opinion. Just an observation. But it looks like they have a statute similar to the one in my state, which I will get to in a second. First, some more background. In most states, if an insurance company pays their insured for damages the insured sustained caused by the negligence of another, the insurance company has a right of subrogation to sue the tortfeasor to get the money back that they paid. (Many on the board are famiiar with that with respect to damages to their plane.) A release signed by the insured releasing the tortfeasor will also act to release the claim of the insurance company in subrogation, because the insurer stands in the shoes of its policy holder. Consequently, most underinsured motorist policies require that the insured get the consent of the carrier before they can settle the claim with the tortfeasor. The insurance company will then say, hell no, you can't settle the claim, because you are defeating out subro claim, and we are getting nothing. So, that stops the insured from effectively settling with the tortfeasor, and everyone now has to go to trial to resolve all these issues. Now for the statute: As in my state, it looks like Maryland passed a statute which requires the underinsurance carrier to make a choice-- let the insured settle with the tortfeasor, and give up the right of subrogation, or to front the amount of the settlement offer by the tortfeasor. In my state, it has to be an offer of the tortfeasor's entire policy limits to trigger the mandate to front the money or essentially waive the subrogation right. (This makes sense, because the UIM claim doesn't attach until the liability limits are exhausted.) This allows the insured to get paid the amount of the tortfeasor's settlement offer one way or the other. So, that could be what happened here.

So how what happened in this case? I am not positive because I need to see the pleadings in the case. But it seems to me to be likely that the decedent's carrier simply allowed a policy limits settlement, and then was simply defending against the first party action for the underinsured benefits, which made it look they were defending the tortfeasor, when in reality, they were just defending the contract claim.
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Whatever. If I discover that my insurance company is defending my opponent in court and that person did not have a pre-existing policy with that company I'm gonna be real ****ed. It will take more that a lot of legal jargon to convince me that it was in my best interest.
 
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Gary F said:
It will take more that a lot of legal jargon to convince me that it was in my best interest.
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Who ever said it was in your best interest? I just disagree with the assumption that an insurance carrier has no right to defend itself.
 
PPC1052 said:
Who ever said it was in your best interest? I just disagree with the assumption that an insurance carrier has no right to defend itself.
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Some companies do a better job of taking care of their customers than others. Insurance companies take our money to help us deal with unforeseen events and we trust the company to honor the agreement. When circumstances are murky a good company will side with the customer. Everybody must remain within the framework of the law but there is some evidence that this company put it's interest well ahead of the policy holder. This is not a good course of action for an insurance company.
 
Well, Progressive lost the PR war handily today...

Was flipping through channels on the lunch run down the street and heard "Progressive Insurance" so I stopped.

Glenn Beck is interviewing the brother.

And they had researched more info about Progressive's panic'ed PR people sending out twisted "condolence" statements on Twitter and Press Releases trying to say they "weren't the attorney for the Defendant", which just garnered the question from Beck of...

"So which table did their lawyers sit at?"

Ding ding ding.

Of course, the motion filed by Progressive to even be allowed to represent the Defendant as an original party to the case was also pointed out.

The answer was... not only did they not sit behind the guy, the Progressive lawyers sat at his table next to him for the entire trial.

Scumbags.
 
denverpilot said:
Well, Progressive lost the PR war handily today...

Was flipping through channels on the lunch run down the street and heard "Progressive Insurance" so I stopped.

Glenn Beck is interviewing the brother.

And they had researched more info about Progressive's panic'ed PR people sending out twisted "condolence" statements on Twitter and Press Releases trying to say they "weren't the attorney for the Defendant", which just garnered the question from Beck of...

"So which table did their lawyers sit at?"

Ding ding ding.

Of course, the motion filed by Progressive to even be allowed to represent the Defendant as an original party to the case was also pointed out.

The answer was... not only did they not sit behind the guy, the Progressive lawyers sat at his table next to him for the entire trial.

Scumbags.
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It does not look good for Progressive. The average schmuck won't be able to understand how Progressive was actually working on behalf of the policy holder. I'm sure that this will cost them business many times what they might have saved if they had won the court case for the other driver. All the attorneys here who believe they acted properly might want to switch to Progressive as a show of support if they aren't already insured with them.
 
Gary F said:
It does not look good for Progressive. The average schmuck won't be able to understand how Progressive was actually working on behalf of the policy holder. I'm sure that this will cost them business many times what they might have saved if they had won the court case for the other driver. All the attorneys here who believe they acted properly might want to switch to Progressive as a show of support if they aren't already insured with them.
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How would them winning the Defendant's case been working in behalf of the deceased policyholder?

The other item I forgot was the brother directly answered the dollar amount question... Other info in this thread is wrong. The brother said the amount was $75,000.

Not 750,000 as reported by a number of outlets.

Just as the brother said, I'm with him... "I'm sure there's legal niceties and things I don't understand, but they fought my sister's dead parents. That's wrong."

I wholeheartedly agree. Lawyers without hearts and morals aren't worth the air they breathe. Tell me morally how you supporting Progressive is right?

A bunch of bad insurance laws on the books doesn't equate to justice or civilization.

Beck finished off by encouraging the brother to "make them pay, and make them fire the people who made this decision to pursue this course of action".

Like I've said before, lovely world you're building with all these broken useless laws for future generations.

Let's make some more laws. We need more and more every year. It will make legal representation simpler, cheaper, and better. More efficient too. And society a better place. Lots of obscure, inane laws, laws, laws. (Yes, that's sarcasm.)

I believe in the rule of law, but they have to be tempered by moral men. If someone is killed by someone else who's underinsured and they have an underinsured motorist policy, let's pay them.

Let's stop making up an insurance policy that's 100 pages long governed by 100,000 pages of inane crap only a lifetime of study could possibly understand. All designed to remove the exact thing that was promised by the insurance company.

That's not civilized. That's a mess.
 
denverpilot said:
How would them winning the Defendant's case been working in behalf of the deceased policyholder?
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I'm sorry. I meant to write "even if they had won the case for the other driver". My brain had trouble comprehending how the company could working against the policy holder.
denverpilot said:
The other item I forgot was the brother directly answered the dollar amount question... Other info in this thread is wrong. The brother said the amount was $75,000.

Not 750,000 as reported by a number of outlets.

Just as the brother said, I'm with him... "I'm sure there's legal niceties and things I don't understand, but they fought my sister's dead parents. That's wrong."

I wholeheartedly agree. Lawyers without hearts and morals aren't worth the air they breathe. Tell me morally how you supporting Progressive is right?

A bunch of bad insurance laws on the books doesn't equate to justice or civilization.

Beck finished off by encouraging the brother to "make them pay, and make them fire the people who made this decision to pursue this course of action".

Like I've said before, lovely world you're building with all these broken useless laws for future generations.

Let's make some more laws. We need more and more every year. It will make legal representation simpler, cheaper, and better. More efficient too. And society a better place. Lots of obscure, inane laws, laws, laws. (Yes, that's sarcasm.)

I believe in the rule of law, but they have to be tempered by moral men. If someone is killed by someone else who's underinsured and they have an underinsured motorist policy, let's pay them.

Let's stop making up an insurance policy that's 100 pages long governed by 100,000 pages of inane crap only a lifetime of study could possibly understand. All designed to remove the exact thing that was promised by the insurance company.

That's not civilized. That's a mess.
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Even if Progressive wanted their policy holder to lose and had the legal right to fight against the policy holder it was a stupid decision. I am certain it will cost them dearly. I hope none of the people who get fired because of this fiasco end up working for my insurance company.
 
timwinters said:
FTFY

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Yeah, but let's get real. Corporations don't DO things. People do.

And the people that have turned our largest companies against the employees need to be called out on it and ashamed.

"Human Resources" instead of "Personnel". "Procedures will be followed" over thought and common sense. "Next quarters numbers trump all so I can get my stock options for my six family trusts the Board who are all personal friends and don't govern at all, approved" vs "let's do what's best for our people even if it hurts". Etc.

The almost total lack of willingness in our PC world to say, "Hey, you. That's a really jerk-head way to live and treat people who had your back if you only had some clue what you wanted this company to build for you, you schmuck!" has proven that all it accomplishes is worse problems. That and, "I won't say this is wrong because I will lose my job."

When the whole town used to know what a prick you were, things took care of themselves. That's the amazing power of the Internet in some respects, we now know what the lawyer sleaze hired and run by Progressive are up to, how truly bad our Politicians are as people, etc.

Now the town buys books and reads about your selfish exploits and says you were a visionary. Yeah, right.

Now the question for the whole Country is... What do we do about it? Or does anyone even care?
 
Let me get his straight. Some legal whiz kid decided it is smarter to fight paying $75k and spend double that on attorneys to fight for the person that killed their client, when one commercial costs hundreds of thousands.

Maybe these guys should run for congress! :rofl:
 
Do you guys really want to make a rule that insurance companies cannot defend themselves whenever someone makes an uninsured/underinsured motorist claim? That's what you guys seem to be saying.

I don't condone a foolish decision by an adjuster with respect to a determination of how to handle the claim (and we really don't know that they did in this case without reviewing all the facts), but I believe the insurance company should not have to accept a policy holder's version of the facts in every case.
 
TedR3 said:
I would respectfully disagree. People who support tort reform support the contributory negligence doctrine.

I'm sure that there have been attempts to introduce comparative negligence statutes in Maryland. Docs, insurance cos., etc. have fought and will fight tooth and nail to retain contributory negligence in Maryland:

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/07/23/prca0723.htm
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Also, note that if tort reform had been enacted here, the decedent's family would also have recovered attorney's fees because they were the prevailing party. So tort reform would have helped this family.
 
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denverpilot said:
"So which table did their lawyers sit at?"

Ding ding ding.
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Pure sophistry. Do we know if there was a third counsel table? And so what if they did sit at the same table? Their interests were aligned with the alleged tortfeasor's in that they were both arguing that it was the decedent's fault. What's wrong with sitting at the same table?
 
PPC1052 said:
Do you guys really want to make a rule that insurance companies cannot defend themselves whenever someone makes an uninsured/underinsured motorist claim? That's what you guys seem to be saying.

I don't condone a foolish decision by an adjuster with respect to a determination of how to handle the claim (and we really don't know that they did in this case without reviewing all the facts), but I believe the insurance company should not have to accept a policy holder's version of the facts in every case.
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You are going to have a hard time spinning this one for Progressive. It looks like they had reason to believe that the policy holder's estate had a valid claim but the company decided to try to weasel out of it anyway. I can imagine some hot shot lawyer for Progressive trying to convince management. "Yea we can win this one. Let's get the brain damaged chick to testify and we can get the victim 1% responsible, no payout. We will save $75,000 minus all the costs of fighting this and will get a boatload of bad publicity to boot." Pure genius.

PPC1052 said:
Pure sophistry. Do we know if there was a third counsel table? And so what if they did sit at the same table? Their interests were aligned with the alleged tortfeasor's in that they were both arguing that it was the decedent's fault. What's wrong with sitting at the same table?
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If you are an attorney and feel this way you might want to send your CV to Progressive. They may have an opening for an in-house attorney soon. I wonder what they teach in law school to get people to have this type of thought process.
 
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PPC1052 said:
Pure sophistry. Do we know if there was a third counsel table? And so what if they did sit at the same table? Their interests were aligned with the alleged tortfeasor's in that they were both arguing that it was the decedent's fault. What's wrong with sitting at the same table?
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If something is legal, it is also always just?
 
It amazes me how stupid these companies can be. I suppose it's entirely possible that they do this quite often and most people just don't put up a fight. With the way things can go "viral" on the internet now -- this is going to be something they'll regret having done.

When my policy with Progressive expires I will find a new insurance company.
 
I think "Flobot" from the ubiquitous TV Commercials handled this whole deal for Progressive.

Either that or the Doofuses who are standing around in a different Progressive commercial with their pants on fire.

Cheers
 
Gary F said:
You are going to have a hard time spinning this one for Progressive. It looks like they had reason to believe that the policy holder's estate had a valid claim but the company decided to try to weasel out of it anyway. I can imagine some hot shot lawyer for Progressive trying to convince management. "Yea we can win this one. Let's get the brain damaged chick to testify and we can get the victim 1% responsible, no payout. We will save $75,000 minus all the costs of fighting this and will get a boatload of bad publicity to boot." Pure genius.


If you are an attorney and feel this way you might want to send your CV to Progressive. They may have an opening for an in-house attorney soon. I wonder what they teach in law school to get people to have this type of thought process.
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Wow. So saying that an insurance company has a right to defend itself is "spinning?" You really don't believe an insurance company has any right to defend itself. I guess we will just agree to disagree on that one.

You state that "Progressive had reason to believe the policy holder's estate may have a valid claim." That's not the standard. The question is whether Progressive had reason to view the claim differently. I don't know how to state this any clearer than I have, but you simply don't know unless you review all of the evidence. There seems to be some evidence that there was conflicting testimony in the form of the testimony of the passenger in the decedent's car. Were there potential issues with that witness' credibility? The report says there was. But we don't really know how strong the witness was, and whether there were other issues with the rest of the evidence. We don't know anything about the physical evidence. We don't know exactly what the supposedly independent witness actually stated, or how compelling that witness' statement was. There is no discussion at all about the damages issues. I doubt you know anything about what damages were actually recoverable under the applicable wrongful death statute (I certainly do not), so you can't possibily know if there were damage questions that were also part of the adjuster's decision making process. You are given a few select facts calculated to make you feel a certain way, and can't fathom you don't have the whole story. Would you really advocate a rush to judgment without really knowing all of the facts?
 
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At this point, since they lost, we DO know the witnesses testimony was not credible. In hindsight, anyway. And they knew it prior to putting her on the stand.

No one's saying Progressive can't defend themselves for inappropriate claims, we're saying in this case they really pushed the moral and ethical line (oh come on, they stepped over it) in an effort to save $75K instead of simply paying what they said they would pay when they sold the policy. The law is meant to protect them from frivolous claims, not realistic ones. To try to push for a "1% at fault or more" judgement so they could save $75, was just gambling. And they lost.

Better yet, their gambling and disrespectful behavior found its way to the Internet where they've been judged in the court of public opinion to be, ass-hats. And folks will vote with their dollars.
 
Gary F said:
If you are an attorney and feel this way you might want to send your CV to Progressive. They may have an opening for an in-house attorney soon. I wonder what they teach in law school to get people to have this type of thought process.
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No thanks. I don't want to take the pay cut. As I said before, in house counsel doesn't get paid very much.

They teach in law school that all parties stand before the law as equals and that when there are factual disputes, such disputes are to be resolved by a jury. Is that really so crazy?

Justice Roberts eloquently said during his confimation hearing, sometimes the little guy shouldn't win: "I had someone ask me in this process, I don't remember who it was, but somebody asked me, you know, "Are you going to be on the side of the little guy," and you obviously want to give an immediate answer, but as you reflect on it, if the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy is going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy is going to win because my obligation is to the Constitution."
 
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denverpilot said:
At this point, since they lost, we DO know the witnesses testimony was not credible. In hindsight, anyway. And they knew it prior to putting her on the stand.
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So your measure of whether the side was reasonable is simply whether they lost a trial? There isn't a single insurance company of any lasting duration out there that hasn't, at some point, lost a trial. And if you had six different jury members on a different day, the result could have been completely different. Whether they won or lost on a particular day is not the standard, and for good reason. So, please, tell me. How on earth do you know, without having reviewed all of the evidence, that Progressive knew that their position was unreasonable?

You claim that no one is saying Progressive has no right to defend itself, but none of you give me any evidence that shows you have any legitimate way to infer they knew their position was unreasonable. I humbly submit that without a substantially greater amount of information that we have, none of us are in a position to determine in this instance whether Progressive's position was reasonable.
 
Sounds like some posting on here are morally obligated to cancel their insurance policies and go bare based on their professed hatred of insurance companies... Of course they will have to surrender their driving license

There is no such thing as a moral corporation... They are amoral and obligated by law to maximize their profits for the owners (you and me as mutual fund shareholders)

There is no such thing as a lawyer with a heart when acting in professional capacity... They are obligated toeffectivly represent their client and take EVERY action that is in their client's best interest...

I was being deposed by a lawyer representing a client who beat his step children with a lamp cord (nasty wounds) I was the initial treating doctor when they were brought to the EMR... She asked a bunch of of hostile, leading and loaded questions to try and place doubt on my written treatment records.
As we were walking out I commented she was being very hard on me... She grinned and said, well, you are a big boy and can handle it, and he is guilty as hell so I don't have any other line of defense to offer the jury...
I said, defending this guy has to be unpleasant...
She said, 'That SOB isn't being invited to my house for dinner in this lifetime.'
 
Gary F said:
I'm troubled. I know British tabloids may not be considered the ultimate arbiter of truth but if you believe the facts as presented the insurance company definitely took the low road. I would not want to do business with that kind of insurance company.


http://mattfisher.tumblr.com/post/29338478278/my-sister-paid-progressive-insurance-to-defend-her
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Progressive may learn a lesson that State Farm and Allstate learned over a decade ago, juries hate insurance companies and Bad Faith suits add a couple of zeros to the original denied claim.
 
Henning said:
Progressive may learn a lesson that State Farm and Allstate learned over a decade ago, juries hate insurance companies and Bad Faith suits add a couple of zeros to the original denied claim.
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Yep. Juries hate a lot of things. Lawyers. Plaintiffs. Insurance companies. Corporations. Criminal defendants. Jury duty. I could go on.
 
PPC1052 said:
Of course not. But it doesn't mean that it is unjust. I simply ask for evidence of injustice. Is that not just?
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Seems to me you were asking about and talking about a lot of legal stuff. I didn't get the sense you were looking for justice, but were fixated on what is legal.
 
Dr. O said:
Sounds like some posting on here are morally obligated to cancel their insurance policies and go bare based on their professed hatred of insurance companies... Of course they will have to surrender their driving license
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Most States have the ability to sign an affadavit of self-insurance, if you have the assets. For most who can, they don't, because the monetary risk is too high. But insurance is not truly 100% required.

Dr. O said:
There is no such thing as a moral corporation... They are amoral and obligated by law to maximize their profits for the owners (you and me as mutual fund shareholders)
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I disagree. This is the modern interpretation of it, but when companies have smart, non-Asperger's Syndrom folks running the place, the humans involved sometimes WILL make judgement calls that might mean a slightly poorer outcome for the company TODAY in order to retain employees and show true leadership and good behavior. "Corporations" don't exist in a vacuum. There are humans running their every move.

Or maybe you're saying we should ban Corporations and go back to companies with named humans in charge who are individually liable for the company's actions. I could see that maybe being what you're saying. It's ugly, but it'd change the world dramatically if no one had to pierce a Corporate veil, ever. Find the human who made the decision and hold them truly responsible... never a bad thing in the long run.

Dr. O said:
There is no such thing as a lawyer with a heart when acting in professional capacity... They are obligated toeffectivly represent their client and take EVERY action that is in their client's best interest...
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Again, they're human and many can and do fudge this up to the limits of getting caught and disbarred. But people who know when something is wrong morally and live it through their actions, are always better people to be around, build your society around, and overall are better in the long term for everyone. Blindly hiding behind the "I did the very best I could for the customer" when the customer is a fake entity, a Corporation, is a sign of the overall illness we face as a society. No morals, no common sense, no civility, so let's replace them with libraries of inane laws only professional excuse-makers can possibly fathom.

They spend their time at school learning to debate, and then waste everyone else's time by going into politics and creating more and more and more things for themselves and their colleagues to debate over! And they get paid by the hour. Isn't that obviously a broken never-ending cycle, from a purely system's engineering standpoint?

Simple common sense answer: I bought an underinsured motorist policy, someone killed me, they were underinsured, insurance company pays, family grieves, life goes on.

Lawyer answer: See pages and pages of answers from one of our resident lawyers justifying it all via laws that aren't even the same from State to State, sometimes from City to City, that make no sense to anyone who applies the Simple common sense answer.

Two things seem very appropriate to fix the U.S. system, but won't be applied as long as the majority of Congress are American Bar Association members...

1. Corporations should not have the same rights as a human. Many countries don't do this, and after studying about it, it seems to match the common sense rule. No company has more or equal rights to a Man.

2. Loser pays. Period. There's major problems with this, but it's utterly insane that someone can go bankrupt defending themselves against a claim they know in the end, they will prevail on.

3. A more controversial but interesting idea someone floated my way once... Corporations can't sue someone or something unless a majority of their employees and/or shareholders agree. If they're really just a conglomeration of their people... well, it's has huge problems, but it was an interesting idea, nevertheless. In theory the Board of Directors would be in the loop, but using the example case we're talking about here, and the size of the company, I doubt they were even aware of this "piddly" lawsuit. A lawsuit that to this Corporation, is nothing in terms of overall revenues, but which is life-changing for this family. That's the size/clout/monetary difference that's really broken our system today -- a Corporation may simply THREATEN to sue almost any individual and know that the individual will be bankrupt in 24 hours if they choose to defend. Similar sentiment with individuals threatening to sue Corporations.

If not loser-pays, here's a funny thought that'd be HATED by lawyers... the Corporation has the same legal budget the other party does. If I can only afford to hire a $25/hr lawyer, and only one, that's what you get to hire too. LOL! That one is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but it shows the crux of the problem.
 
Bob Noel said:
Seems to me you were asking about and talking about a lot of legal stuff.
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Yes. I was trying to help people understand that certain procedural requirements that people erroneously believe to be evidence of nefarious conduct is no evidence of misconduct.

Bob Noel said:
I didn't get the sense you were looking for justice, but were fixated on what is legal.
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[/QUOTE]

That is not correct. I tried to explain the legal system in the hopes that others would understand that, based solely on the evidence available, their rush to judgment is not warranted. I personally believe that asking people to consider all of the relevant information and to disregard irrelevant information does serve the interest of justice.
 
PPC1052 said:
Yes. I was trying to help people understand that certain procedural requirements that people erroneously believe to be evidence of nefarious conduct is no evidence of misconduct.

That is not correct. I tried to explain the legal system in the hopes that others would understand that, based solely on the evidence available, their rush to judgment is not warranted. I personally believe that asking people to consider all of the relevant information and to disregard irrelevant information does serve the interest of justice.
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Look man, this is all nice and good, and I understand what you're saying...

But the "rush to judgement" is because of this:

If you buy a product from someone, and they walk into court and sit down at the other guy's table... they're your ENEMY from that point on.

You purchased something from them, they have advertisements running 24/7 saying they're to be TRUSTED, and yet, they have chosen which foxhole they want to be in. And it wasn't yours.

At that point, they're immoral liars who are going to hide behind all that "stuff" you've added to the problem above, to shoot at you in your foxhole across the way. Legal or not, they're shooting at you after saying day in and day out on the TV that they're "there for you", and they're "like a good neighbor"... yadda yadda.

The judgement isn't a legal judgement, it's a judgement of moral character and trust. Progressive chose to be immoral. They deserve to lose lots of customers over it. They can't be trusted. They may be doing exactly what's necessary from the LEGAL standpoint, but from the human/moral standpoint, they started shooting bullets at the family of a dead woman who ultimately, won.

For an industry who spends MILLIONS asking people to trust them with their lives and their families lives if they DIE, this is WELL DESERVED backlash. You can say their lawyers did everything they should, and be 100% right, but the lawyers know they're working toward an immoral end, and the company decision-makers did also. They chose to shoot.
 
denverpilot said:
Simple common sense answer: I bought an underinsured motorist policy, someone killed me, they were underinsured, insurance company pays, family grieves, life goes on.
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This shows me exactly what I think you are missing in the Progressive Insurance case. Underinsured coverage only pays if the underinsured driver was at fault, and only for damages caused by the underinsured driver up to the limits of the policy. It's not a life insurance policy. If what you want is someone to pay when you die, buy a life insurance policy. The risks are different, and the price structure is therefore different. But if this is the type of coverage that you want, you should pay for it.
 
PPC1052 said:
This shows me exactly what I think you are missing in the Progressive Insurance case. Underinsured coverage only pays if the underinsured driver was at fault, and only for damages caused by the underinsured driver up to the limits of the policy. It's not a life insurance policy. If what you want is someone to pay when you die, buy a life insurance policy. The risks are different, and the price structure is therefore different. But if this is the type of coverage that you want, you should pay for it.
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Fourth line in Post #17.
 
denverpilot said:
Look man, this is all nice and good, and I understand what you're saying...

But the "rush to judgement" is because of this:

If you buy a product from someone, and they walk into court and sit down at the other guy's table... they're your ENEMY from that point on.
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The estate and the insurance company had a dispute. They are adversaries. So what? As I said before, it is evident that you simply don't think an insurance company has a right to disagree with a policy holder. I don't agree with you.

An insurance company should have the right to dispute a claim, as long as there is a reasonable basis to do so. That they lost isn't that evidence. You need to look at all of the information that was available, as well as what wasn't available to the adjuster, when they made their determination in order to evaluate that factual question. We don't have enough information in this case.
 
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