Here is an interview with personal injury attorney, Brad Mainor on the Legal Briefs Network discussing how insurance companies us a complex computer program called Colossus to help them offer lower personal injury claims and why having the right attorney can help combat this.
Cynthia: It’s been discovered that insurance companies use a highly complex computer program called Colossus to evaluate the financial value of personal injury claims. Now how this program works is a mystery to the public and neither the software developer nor the insurance companies will divulge exactly how the program determines the value of accident claims.
Brad Mainor, a partner in the law firm of Blackburn Wirth Injury Lawyers consistently battles insurance companies reluctant to fully compensate injured policy holders.
Brad Mainor: Colossus is a program that’s been developed which is designed to minimize losses for insurance companies. The human factor has been taken out of claims with Colossus. You’ve essentially become a statistic.
Cynthia: Not a mystery, however, is the way the program considerably increases the insurance companies’ profits at the cost of injury victims.
Brad Mainor: The reason why Colossus is being implemented and it’s being implemented by most insurance companies, the reason why is to minimize their losses. It’s for them to keep hold onto their money. The greatest business cost to insurance companies is paying out claims to injured victims. The more they minimize that, the more they can statistically chip away at the value of claims, the more money that they make.
Cynthia: Now according to industry experts when a policy holder files an injury claim, Colossus uses mathematical calculations to determine whether to contest the claim, the intent to minimize payment of benefits.
Brad Mainor: Colossus is designed to make you an average and by doing that, claims that are worth more aren’t being paid their full value. They just tell people this is as much we’re going to offer. There’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the value of your claim, take it or leave it.
Cynthia: Overcoming the Colossus obstacle can prove a very difficult challenge for many injury victims. Insurance in the United States is big business, estimated at over half a trillion dollars. Individual policy holders, though technically protected by laws, stand to lose thousands and even millions of dollars in potential benefits by challenging such massive companies all alone.
Brad Mainor: The average consumer really can’t stand up against Colossus. Colossus has been designed and been implemented by the top insurance companies in the country. There’s really nothing that the average consumer can do by themselves to combat Colossus. It’s a giant. That’s why it’s important to have an experienced attorney that knows how to stand up against Colossus and represent you in your claim.
We have seen injured people who have come to us after having tried to get a value on their claim through Colossus and we’ve seen not only three-times the value of their claim, we’ve seen as much as 10, 20, 30-times the value of their claim because Colossus doesn’t take into account a lot of different factors that can be very, very sizable in the eyes of a jury.
Cynthia: Even inexperienced lawyers can be bullied or simply over-powered by these giants. This is likely one of the reasons that consumers faced with an injury who hire an attorney receive on average almost three-times more money than those who take on these corporations alone.
Brad Mainor: It’s interesting that one of the factors that Colossus evaluates is #1: Do you have an attorney? If you don’t have attorney, then it’s going to spit out a different value.
But, it doesn’t stop there. The next thing it determines is how good is your attorney? Does this attorney go to trial? Does this attorney get large verdicts? Is this attorney successful? How successful is their firm? How resourceful are they? And that is calculated into the value of a claim.
So, just on its face it’s very important to get, not only a lawyer, but a good experienced trial lawyer.
Cynthia: It would seem that with such daunting obstacles mounting against injury victims, the safer and smarter choice for those seeking compensation for an injury is to simply hire a good attorney.
