I received this email from a personal injury lawyer in Maryland this morning:
I have an MIA complaint involving Allstate offered the number provided by Colossus and now, of course, refuses to produce any Colossus manuals, etc. Do you have some useful Colossus materials?
I don’t. Maryland’s bad faith law is recent and it makes relevant lines of inquiry from Maryland accident lawyers that before would have been irrelevant including, as this email suggests, how Allstate values first-party uninsured or underinsured accident cases. If any lawyer out there has anything that might be of use that I could pass along, will you drop me an email?
As a side note, the American Association for Justice ranks Allstate as the worst insurance company in the country (for consumers, at least). That may be true nationally, I don’t know. But I don’t think it is true in Maryland. I’d rather draw Allstate in a personal injury case in Maryland than I would a lot of other insurance companies. Name names? Sure, why not? It is Friday. I would rather have Allstate than Progressive, MAIF, State Farm, Unitrin, or GEICO.
GEICO is a recent addition to my “better than Allstate list.” Along the way in the past three years, GEICO stole some pages out of that McKinsey & Co. report that told Allstate to put on boxing gloves and added a few pages of their own. Their in-house Maryland lawyers (Besok & Mullen and John Dahut & Associates) are excellent lawyers easy to deal with but we are filing too many lawsuits in GEICO cases that should have settled before being filed. The message for Maryland accident lawyers, as always: if the offer is not fair, encourage your client to file a lawsuit. Too many personal injury lawyers choose the path of least resistance when pushing to settle even when the settlement is unfair. This is the reason the boxing gloves paradigm works.