Oregon personal injury lawyer Aaron DeShaw has been invited to speak on insurance settlements, as the featured speaker at the Iowa Association for Justice Annual Convention. DeShaw is the only speaker being provided two lecture spots.
DeShaw will be teaching lawyers about the Colossus insurance claims program, which he wrote the definitive book about in 2004, which he followed as co-counsel in a class-action case that obtained over $1 Billion for policyholders who had been underpaid by their own insurers as the result of a conspiracy between insurance software vendors and over 500 insurance companies. Colossus, and other programs similar to it, [Claims Outcome Advisor, InjuryIQ, and Exposure Manager (“Xm”)] continue to be used in third-party settlements (between one driver and another), as well as in some first-party cases (Uninsured Motorist and Underinsured Motorist claims).
DeShaw’s lecture is about what lawyers need to know about these concealed insurance programs in order to obtain the best settlement offers for their client’s actual injuries (assuming the adjustor understands the claim and enters it correctly into their computer program.) Because of the value of this information to lawyers handling injury claims, DeShaw is one of the most sought after speakers on the national plaintiff lawyer speaking circuit.
DeShaw will be joined in Iowa by leading trial lawyers from throughout the country including Peter Anderson of Colorado, Karen Roberts of Texas, Keith Mitnik (lead litigator at Morgan & Morgan), Karen Koehler (aka The Velvet Hammer) of Washington, and others.
While DeShaw is best known for his books and lectures on the Colossus system and how to create demand letters for settlement lawyers, DeShaw’s own legal practice is not focused on settlement. Why? Because he knows that the insurance software is intentionally set by insurers to underpay claims 12-20% below what insurance companies know the cases are worth. In short, the insurers attempt to underpay claims in nearly every case, even when it is their own policyholder. And in states such as Oregon, where there are no “bad faith” laws protecting injured people, insurance companies often offer a small fraction of the true value of their case. As a result, DeShaw focuses his attention on a small number of brain injury and catastrophic injury claims nationally and litigates a high percentage of those cases to get his clients a fair value for their actual injuries.