Mʏᴇʀs & Cᴏᴍᴘᴀɴʏ
No Contact, No Problem
A lot of motorcycle accidents don't involve contact with the defendant's vehicle. The motorcycle rider goes down before hitting the car, truck, etc.
Insurance companies love to deny these claims. I think adjusters must go to a two-week course called: Personal Injury through the Insurer's Lens.
In that course they engraph all sorts of requirements and rules onto the actual law.
There's no better example than an insurance company arguing that since its insured's vehicle didn't hit the motorcycle, there's no liability.
That's ridiculous. Under Washington law, physical contact between the vehicles is not an element of a negligence claim. If a driver negligently pulls into the path of a motorcycle or bicycle and the rider reasonably brakes, swerves, or otherwise takes evasive action and goes down, the driver can be liable even though the vehicles never touch.
The right question isn't: "Did the car hit the motorcycle?” It is: “Did the car create the emergency that caused the rider to go down?”
There are a couple of other things that are important about no-impact cases. When the vehicles collide, the physical evidence itself tends to establish that the vehicles’ paths conflicted. You don't have that same kind of physical evidence in no-contact cases. And if the vehicle that causes the crash doesn't stay at the scene, the injured rider has to report the wreck within 72 hours in order to make a "phantom vehicle" claim under his/her UM coverage.
We have had a couple cases like this for both motorcycle and bicycle riders. Most settle. But there are some where we've had to file suit.
In one we received a low offer (and pushback about who was at fault). We filed suit. After filing suit we developed and put together a host of evidence that proved the defendant driver violated our client's right of way and that our client's efforts to avoid a collision with the defendant's vehicle were reasonable.
A combination of aggressive case preparation (and a very good client) resulted in a settlement of more than five times the total medical expenses. (Which is an interesting barometer to use for settlements. Sometimes the treatment is a good indicator of severity of injury. And in those cases 5X treatment expenses is a good result. There are other cases where there isn't that linkage and you have to look at other reference points to figure out case value.)
Two claps for properly framing the issue and not getting sucked into the insurance company's vortex of fake requirements.