Colossus
Colossus is a computer program that values personal injury claims for at least half of the insurance claims in the United States. Colossus was used by the Government Insurance Office of Australia in the 80s and was licensed and popularized by Allstate in the 90s. Allstate turned to Colossus, developed by Computer Sciences Corp., because they wanted to standarize and simply what their adjusters evaluated. Allstate also turned to Colossus because it was billed as a means save money on payouts. Though Colossus, Allstate also figured out that most plaintiffs' lawyer - and Colossus identifies those lawyers - will not file a lawsuit in most cases and are willing to settle for the best offer that they can get.
Colossus considers a number of preliminary matters before looking at your individual case and injuries. Colossus considers whether your attorneys have a record of taking their cases to court if they get an inferior offer or whether they always just take the best offer given by the insurance company. It considers the jurisdiction in which the claim arises.
Colossus ostensibly provides consistent estimates of injury costs. Insurance company claims adjusters have varying degrees of knowledge and experience, which can lead to varying judgments in the value of claims. Colossus performs a "calculation" to attribute "severity points" to claims. Injuries have an injury profile that assigns a base severity rating, which is the starting point in the personal injury claim evaluation. After consideration to the personal injury attorneys involved and the venue, the system counts up the points and converts them to a dollar value.
By using Colossus, insurance companies will try to decrease the value of your claim, and will not take into consideration the X-factors: stress, pain, inconvenience, loss of enjoyment of life, loss of consortium (relationship), inability to participate in the things that you enjoy most, or any number of other things that a juries and even judges will consider.
Essentially, the problem with Colossus is the that it cannot take the place of human beings understanding of human suffering. A computer just cannot get that. Occasionally, this paradoxically helps clients because Colossus and similar computerized systems that compute approximate values for personal injury cases incorrectly assume that a specific injury had a greater impact on the patient than it really did. Sometimes we will get a particularly unsympathetic injured client who was not impacted a great deal by their significant injury. This client does better with such an unfeeling system. But more likely, the opposite occurs. There is no computer value that can ascertain the pain and suffering, how an injury really impacted a person's life. Accordingly, your accident attorney must adequately articulate why your case is different or be prepared to file suit and begin battle with the insurance company. Judges and juries listen to and consider many of the factors that Colossus ignores because it does not understand them. Maryland juries make distinctions based upon whether or not they think the plaintiff is an honest good person who has suffered as a result of their injuries.
In fact, Maryland juries are in many ways the antithesis of Colossus. A jury in, for example, Baltimore City, might not award damages for a L4/L5 lumbar (back) herniated disc. The medical terminology and the treating doctor's explanation of the injury might not resonate with them. But that jury comprised of human beings will award money damages because the injury victim's back hurts so much that she cannot hold her 18 month-old daughter without pain.
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