Car Accident Insurance Settlements: What is Colossus?

If you are in a car accident, you will need to file an insurance claim. In the claim package, you will usually include data on the personal, financial and medical damages. An adjuster investigates the essential aspects of your case compiling his/her own set of information. When the gathering process is over, the adjustor, in all probability, will turn to Colossus. Insurance companies across the United States and around the world rely on this or related systems.

What Is Colossus?

Colossus is an insurance software program. It is one of several such systems utilizing the computer to perform the task of claims evaluation. It is the product of the Computer Sciences Corporation. The company sells it to insurance companies as a means of supplementing the skills and judgment of an experienced insurance investigator and/or adjustor.

Why Colossus?

Unfortunately Colossus, insurance companies have found, can act as a replacement for a trained individual. Many companies opt to use it for many reasons.

• It is consistent with its results
• A minimally trained person can feed it the data
• It can be adjusted to reflect its own figures for specific claim types
• It is a scientific method of determining a settlement figure

Colossus relies only on the factual material. It is “objective” in the sense it provides a “Best Practices” approach to analyzing a settlement claim.

The Problem With Colossus

There are many problems associated with Colossus. It is not the fault of the software. It is the application of and reliance on it that makes the usage faulty. A list of difficulties is below:

• As a software program, Colossus can only analyze what goes in
• The program is designed to produce a “severity point” total. This is not a figure
• Each insurance company takes the basic software program and sets it to their own specified figure
• The result of the above 2 combining is very low numbers not reflective of reality
• Colossus cannot accept or analyze non-objective data. In other words, it has no basis for computing actual pain and suffering

Overall, the major problem with Colossus is the insurance companies’ reliance on it as a final solution. The manufacturer considers it a tool; the insurance companies regard it as the final solution. With Colossus, insurance companies forget the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Car Insurance Claims, Colossus And An Attorney

One means of avoiding the problems with Colossus, is to hire an accident attorney. He/she can help you argue successfully against the issues arising from an artificially low settlement claim.

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