Many of the insurance carriers facing claims from motorcycle riders injured by unsafe automobile drivers have increased the extent to which they stall on paying claims.  Always slow pay, the recession seems to have caused an epidemic of delay.

Part of the problem can be traced to a continued downsizing in the claims departments of many automotive insurance carriers.  Some claims departments have been moved to less expensive out of state locations, some even have claims people working from home.  Combined with the economy, the claims people remaining with the carriers are ever more reluctant to step up to the plate and evaluate cases.

The result has been ever more reliance on attorneys to perform the claims function by recommending settlements. There are a number of problems with this approach.  The first problem, of course, is that most attorneys are reluctant to evaluate a case until they have done everything they can to look for an out.  This means getting duplicate copies of medical records, taking unnecessary depositions, and having biased defense oriented medical doctors prepare defenses to the medical claims being made.  All of this is expensive for everyone, and seriously delays bringing the case to an end.

The situation is that much worse, however, because the carriers are now squeezing the attorneys even harder.  That makes the attorneys fear losing the business, and results in the attorneys being afraid to recommend a reasonable settlement.

Even cases where the defense admits fault (a rarity, for sure), and the injuries are serious enough to require surgery, are going without any settlement offer until shortly before trial. 

I don't yet see a solution, although I am seeing the insurance companies being hit with verdicts that exceed their policy limits.  Hopefully, at some point, the insurance commissioner will step up to the plate.  Of course, this isn't likely while he is running for governor and looking for campaign money.

In the meantime, the best course of action is to press the carriers with a good lawyer, filing suit early, and pushing the cases through the courts.

        Nice Way to Wreck a Ride                                                           

This week was a bad one for me because it brought up the issue of discrimination against motorcycles.

First, I was on my Triumph Speed Triple, doing a Sunday Morning Ride kind of thing.  It's been a wet winter in California, and I wanted to start warming up my riding skills for the spring season.

I get behind a car full of gang bangers at a stoplight. The thick smell of gange was beyond anything you could imagine.  There were so many  cues of gang activity that you really could not sort them all out.  We take off from the light, go down a main thoroughfare past a major motorcycle dealer, and a cop stopped in a parking lot pulls out to follow -- me.  He stays on my tail for several blocks before giving up. 

It's the kind of nonsense thing that sours the end of the morning ride.  We can't profile terrorists, but we do profile motorcycle riders.

My week starts, and I'm in a deposition on a motorcycle accident.  The attorney taking the deposition goes off on one of the witnesses, who happens to be a motorcycle savvy rider himself.  Have you ever crashed?  (Remember, this is just the witness - not the injured rider?).  Aren't motorcycle crashes common?  Don't motorcycles crash even when they are riding all alone and take a turn too fast?  Etc. etc., and so forth. 

When I point out that this is nothing but discriminatory motorcyclist bashing, and that it has no relevance to the accident we are litigating (which was caused by this lawyer's client), the lawyer defends himself by saying he is a rider himself!  How crummy is that?

I guess its just the nature of our society that every case of an injured motorcyclist requires dealing with these negative preconceptions.

Motorcycle News UK is reporting that this jacket looks quite similar to the gang logo used by the Outlaws. 

A Motorcycle News reader suggests that wearing the jacket could be dangerous if the Outlaws took offense.

In this time when many providers of motorcycle and motorcycle fashion wear are looking to existing designs for graphics, it would be a good idea to at least understand the issues involved.

Now that Triumph is aware of the risk involved with this design, what would their responsibility be if an innocent purchaser wore the jacket in the wrong place?

While the first impression might be to brush this one off, on closer examination, this is a clear unnecessary risk to purchasers of the jacket.  Further, the benefit of the design is small compared to the risk.  You might give Triumph a pass if they did it accidentally, but they have publicly commented on the problem.  At this point, they may well have responsibility to someone who innocently purchases the jacket, not knowing of the problem.