One question for every trucking liability underwriter…
Are you ready to reduce–and even avoid–paying excessively large liability settlements and awards for your insureds?
Of course, you are.
Up until now, the Underwriting community’s best approach to understanding a motor carrier’s risk was to spend their days pouring over disparate data in an attempt to predict and mitigate the frequency of an accident.
People, we’ve been using this approach for decades, and slowly but steadily, we’ve all witnessed the exponential rise in Nuclear Verdicts and felt the financial impact of “death by a thousand cuts”–my disparaging reference to the $5,000 claims that somehow turned into six-figure settlements.
It's 2024, and for an industry veteran like me, I’m living proof that you can teach an old dog new tricks. It’s simple. The fact of the matter is that the industry has been outpaced by data, and we only have one real direction to turn to fix this problem.
Technology
Talk to anyone in this industry, and they’ll tell you that the main driver in the ongoing increase in liability rates for trucking companies is the proliferation of large verdicts and settlements far in excess of the amount the facts of the incident would dictate. So where is this increase coming from?
Predatory Plaintiff Attorneys
Yes. I said it. Nuclear verdicts are a symptom of a “shell game” that has been orchestrated by predatory plaintiff attorneys for over a decade, to inflame juries and expose operational inconsistencies as systemic failures throughout the organization. There’s a narrative about the trucking industry that isn’t appropriate. Once more, there’s only one narrator; predatory plaintiff attorneys! Who is going to speak up on behalf of transportation companies and their insurance partners?
Bluewire
Bluewire uses leading-edge technologies like artificial Intelligence to score the severity risk of motor carriers so you don’t have to. Each month, more than 750,000 interstate motor carriers receive ten risk-related scores, a Bluewire GAP Score summarizing the motor carrier’s overall severity risk, and nine additional severity scores–each representing a critical vulnerability waiting to be exposed as a systemic failure by an aggressive plaintiff attorney when a crash occurs.
You’re not going to believe this, but when any one of these vulnerabilities is exploited by a plaintiff’s attorney, it turns a simple insurance claim into a high-value settlement 94.6% of the time.*
* A recent study by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) titled "Understanding the Impact of Nuclear Verdicts in the Trucking Industry (2019)
Sickening. Isn’t it?
With an annual subscription to Bluewire, Underwriters can now gain direct insight into the severity risk of their insureds before an attack occurs. You’ll continue to predict and mitigate the frequency of accidents, but now Bluewire gives us the ability to foresee the likelihood of an excess settlement because they’ve established a new industry standard for understanding, communicating, and mitigating severity risk.
There are some underwriters out there that have expressed their complacency with the data they receive, and feel they already gather enough data to assess a new or renewing risk through frequency alone. Though I agree that data must be considered, at some point even a trucking company with excellent FMCSA data may have an incident that ends in a demand or litigation. When that happens, the possibility of an extreme settlement or verdict cannot be measured by CSA.
Here is what I would say to someone with that complacent of an attitude…
No one at FMCSA, ever uttered the words, "severity risk." That is never what it was ever designed to be. From the beginning–in 2008–the goal of CSA was to predict future crashes. Almost immediately, everyone realized CSA was incapable of doing so, and as the program has evolved over the years, it has transformed into being a compliance tool for the agency to identify targets for compliance reviews.
CSA Scores are in no way indicative of a company's dedication and devotion to safety. They do look at crash rates, but they don't remotely look at the vulnerabilities that reptile lawyers use to dramatically increase the severity of a claim. Bluewire does. Nobody at the FMCSA, has ever read the ATRI study or understands the Reptile Theory. So in this discussion of severity risk, if you are relying on what you believe to be your excellent CSA Scores, you are relying on the wrong information, and you’re part of the problem.
Become a Bluewire subscriber, and for the first time, actually manage the severity risk for your book of business. Bluewire’s proprietary methods and algorithms measure this possibility for every interstate motor carrier that operates in the United States.
So I will end this post the way I started it–by asking the question:
Are you ready to reduce–and even avoid–paying excessively large liability settlements and awards for your insureds?
If your answer is “Yes”, contact Bluewire today. Every one of your insureds will be glad you did.