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Quick answer
In the 1990s one of the largest US auto insurers hired a management consulting firm to redesign how it handled bodily injury claims. The program was built on roughly 12,500 consultant slides, described in published opinions by appellate courts in three states.
Those records show that the early phone call, the fast offer, and the conversation about whether you need a lawyer were designed elements of a process — not the personality of whoever answered the phone. In the Montana litigation, the plaintiff's theory concerned the insurer's policies toward unrepresented claimants, and the state supreme court called the consultant documents critical to it.
These are 1990s documents and courts did not all reach the same conclusion about them. What has not changed is that a system, not a person, sets the first number you hear.
The thesis of this series in one line: the process that prices your injury was designed by consultants, tuned on past settlements, and built around whether you have anyone advising you.
The call came faster than you expected.
Two days after the crash. Before your second doctor visit. Before you knew whether your neck would be fine in a week or still bothering you in March. Someone friendly, apologetic, wanting to help you get this closed out.
Maybe you thought that was normal. Maybe you thought you got lucky with a decent adjuster.
Here is what almost nobody tells accident victims: the timing of that call was not an accident either.
The short version
In the 1990s, one of the largest auto insurers in the United States hired a management consulting firm to redesign how it handled bodily injury claims. The result was an internal program built on roughly 12,500 consultant slides. Those slides became public after more than a decade of court fights.
They show that the early phone call, the fast offer, and the question of whether you really need a lawyer were elements of a designed process — not the personal style of whoever happened to answer the phone.
You are not dealing with an individual. You are dealing with a workflow.
WHAT THEY DID
Courts described these records. Not bloggers.
In 2013 the Montana Supreme Court described what lawyers had come to call "the McKinsey documents": roughly 12,500 PowerPoint slides that McKinsey & Company produced for Allstate. The same opinion described the insurer's Claims Core Process Redesign program — CCPR — as a distillation of the studies and recommendations contained in those slides.
That is a state supreme court, in a published opinion, describing a factual record.
A Washington appellate court gave the same background in 2009, drawing on an Indiana appellate decision from 2006: the consulting firm was hired in the 1990s to analyze the insurer's automobile bodily injury claims and handling procedures, and the concepts it proposed were summarized in the slides that later became public.
Three appellate courts, three states, seven years apart, all describing the same thing. The program was real. The slides were real. Prying them loose took more than a decade.
What finally shook the documents loose
For years the slides were fought over one case at a time — sealed under protective orders, produced under restriction, argued over again in the next state.
Then in 2008 the fight moved out of the courtroom and into a regulator's office. Florida's insurance commissioner had subpoenaed claims-handling material as part of a rate inquiry, and suspended the company's ability to write new business in the state when it was not produced. That suspension was stayed on appeal within days. Around the same time, the company posted roughly 150,000 pages publicly on its own website.
Note how that happened. Not through a routine inspection. Through more than a decade of litigation, daily fines in another state, and a state subpoena. That is a large part of why you have never heard any of this.
What the released material describes
Strip away the corporate language and the same ideas keep surfacing.
One: reach the claimant early, and build rapport
The program was built around early contact and a prompt offer of what the company considered a fair settlement. In the Montana litigation, the plaintiff's whole theory was that the company's policies toward unrepresented claimants — people handling their own claims, without a lawyer — amounted to bad faith. The state supreme court called the McKinsey documents "critical" to that theory.
Read that again. There were policies aimed specifically at people who did not have a lawyer. Speed was not a courtesy. Speed was a lever.
Two: treat people differently depending on whether they push back
The best-known description of this is the title of a 2008 book — From Good Hands to Boxing Gloves — written by a plaintiffs' attorney who spent years obtaining and analyzing these documents. The phrase captures a two-track idea: cooperative handling for claimants who settle quickly and quietly, a harder posture for those who resist.
Here is exactly what that is and is not:
- It is a characterization drawn from an attorney's book about the documents, and from the court records themselves, which distinguish how represented and unrepresented claimants were handled.
- It is not a finding that any company is doing this to you today. It describes a program documented in the 1990s.
Anyone who blurs that line — who tells you a specific company is running this play on your specific claim right now — is selling you something. We are not going to do that.
The part we are not going to overstate
The courts did not all agree about this material, and pretending otherwise would make everything else here less trustworthy.
In the Montana case, a jury found the insurer had committed bad faith and violated the state's Unfair Trade Practices Act, and it awarded $350,000 in punitive damages. On appeal, that punitive award did not survive — the Montana Supreme Court held, in an earlier round of the same case, that the underlying compensatory damages could not rest solely on the plaintiff's attorney costs and fees, and it sent the case back for a new trial.
So: a jury saw a violation. An appellate court unwound part of the remedy. Both of those things are true, and you are entitled to know both.
We are not going to pretend the record is cleaner than it is. A process can be entirely lawful and still be built to produce a number lower than the one you would reach if you knew what it was doing. That is the point of this whole series.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU
Your claim is not being judged. It is being processed.
The most useful shift you can make: stop reading the adjuster's behavior as a signal about your case.
Friendly does not mean your claim is strong. Fast does not mean generous. Sympathetic does not mean the number is fair.
Those are properties of a workflow — one shaped by people who never saw your file and never will. Once you see that, the phone call stops feeling like a relationship and starts feeling like what it is: a step in someone else's process, running on someone else's clock.
Were you in a crash? Start a free accident record at nowaccident.com. No signup, no email, nothing sold — we do not make money from your claim. The single most useful thing you can do right now is write down what happened while you still remember it exactly. Everything else in this series works better with that record behind it.
The 48-hour window is the whole ballgame
Here is why the timing matters, and it has nothing to do with anyone being dishonest.
Two days after a crash, you do not yet know what is wrong with you. Soft-tissue injuries often get worse before they get better. Concussion symptoms can take days to appear. You have not had the MRI. You have not seen the specialist. You have not yet missed the shifts you are going to miss.
A settlement signed at that point is priced on incomplete information — and it is usually final. You do not get to reopen it in six weeks when your shoulder still will not lift.
If you already took a fast offer
You were not naive.
The process was built so that accepting would feel like the easy, natural, reasonable choice. Being embarrassed about that is like being embarrassed that a door opened when you pushed the bar.
What you can still do: document everything from here forward, and — if it is worth it to you — have an attorney licensed in your state read what you actually signed. Some releases are narrower than people assume, and some are not. That is a question for a lawyer looking at your paperwork, not for a website.
Does any of this depend on which state you live in?
Almost none of it. The consultant program, the court records, and the design of the process are national — the litigation that produced these documents ran through Montana, Washington, Indiana, and a Florida regulator's subpoena. Not one of those is California.
What does vary by state is how much your own regulator publishes about insurers, and that variation is large.
California is a useful example because it sits at the strong end: state law requires its Department of Insurance to publish a Consumer Complaint Study, a ranked table of large auto insurers ordered by justified complaints per 100,000 policies across three years. Built by the regulator, published by the regulator, free.
Most states publish something. Some publish very little. Start with your own state's department of insurance — and if you are in California, we show you exactly where at the end of this piece.
What has actually changed since the 1990s
Some of it, genuinely. Regulators eventually looked at this closely. Practices were revised. Parts of what these documents describe are history.
What has not changed is the shape of the thing. A system, not a person, still sets the first number you hear. That is the part worth knowing today.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY
Start a claim log. Today. Before you read anything else on this site.
One thing. Not five. This one.
Open a note on your phone, or take a cheap paper notebook, and write down every contact about this crash — starting with the ones that already happened, as well as you remember them.
| Record this | Example |
|---|---|
| Date and time | Aug 4, 9:14 a.m. |
| Who — full name, company, claim number | M. Reyes, [Insurer], claim #4471102 |
| What they asked for | Recorded statement |
| What they offered, and the exact figure | $2,800 |
| What you said | Said I'd call back |
| Anything they promised | Offer stays open 30 days |
Then add one line at the end of each day about how you actually feel. Two words is enough. Neck worse. Slept badly. Headache again.
Why this one, and why first:
- It is free, it takes about ninety seconds a day, and there is no version of this that hurts you.
- Memory of the weeks after a crash degrades fast. Notes written the same day do not.
- That daily symptom line becomes a record of how your injury actually developed over time — precisely the information a two-day-old settlement offer cannot contain.
- If you later hire a lawyer, you hand them something most clients simply cannot produce.
- It quietly changes the next phone call. People who are writing things down get talked into fewer things.
You do not need to be adversarial about it. You do not need to announce that you are keeping a log. You just keep it.
Find out where you are in the process
We built a free tool. Pick your situation — just crashed, offer received, denied, or stalled — and it shows you what usually happens at that stage, what you are likely to hear, and how to look up your own insurer's record in California's official complaint study.
No signup. No email. Nothing sold. Ever.
Frequently asked questions
Why does an insurance adjuster call so soon after a car accident? Court-released records from the 1990s describe early contact and a prompt settlement offer as designed steps in a redesigned claims process, aimed in part at reducing the likelihood that a claimant hires a lawyer. Two days after a crash, most people do not yet know the full extent of their injuries, which is what makes an early number easy to calculate and hard to evaluate.
What are the McKinsey documents in insurance claims? Roughly 12,500 PowerPoint slides that McKinsey & Company produced for Allstate in the 1990s, described in Jacobsen v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2013 MT 244. The Montana Supreme Court described the insurer's Claims Core Process Redesign program (CCPR) as a distillation of the studies and recommendations in those slides. Appellate courts in Washington (2009) and Indiana (2006) described the same engagement.
Should I give a recorded statement to the other driver's insurance company? There is no universal answer, and this is not legal advice. What the records show is that early contact was a designed step, and that a recorded statement taken before you know the extent of your injuries captures an incomplete account. Many people ask to respond in writing instead. If liability or the severity of your injury is contested, this is a question worth putting to an attorney licensed in your state.
Is a fast settlement offer after a car accident a good deal? It depends entirely on whether your injury is finished developing. A settlement signed within days of a crash is priced on incomplete information — before an MRI, before a specialist, before missed work accumulates — and settlement releases are usually final. That combination is what makes speed valuable to the party paying.
What should I do first after a car accident claim is opened? Start a written claim log: date and time of every contact, the full name and company of whoever contacted you, the claim number, what was asked for, what was offered and the exact figure, what you said, and anything promised. Add one line each day describing how you physically feel. It is free, takes about ninety seconds a day, and creates a contemporaneous record that memory cannot reproduce later.
Did courts find that the insurer acted unlawfully? Courts reached different conclusions. In the Montana case a jury found bad faith and a violation of the state's Unfair Trade Practices Act and awarded $350,000 in punitive damages; on appeal the punitive award did not survive, the court holding that the underlying compensatory damages could not rest solely on the plaintiff's attorney costs and fees, and remanding for a new trial.
Was this useful? Then send it to someone who was in a crash. This site carries no advertising and sells nothing. It reaches people only when someone passes it on. Start a free accident record at nowaccident.com — no signup, no email.
Next in this series
The records describe a fast first offer. But someone had to decide what a specific injury was worth before that offer could exist.
It was not a person.
Part 2 — The Number Was Never Yours.
Sources
Every factual statement above traces to a court opinion, a regulator's action, or material the company itself released publicly. Where courts disagreed, we said so.
- Jacobsen v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2013 MT 244, 371 Mont. 393 — describes the roughly 12,500 McKinsey slides and their relationship to the CCPR program; recounts that the jury found bad faith and a UTPA violation and awarded $350,000 in punitive damages, and that this was later unwound.
- Jacobsen v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2009 MT 248, 351 Mont. 464 (the earlier round of the same case) — the holding that the compensatory award could not rest solely on the plaintiff's attorney costs and fees, that no punitive damages could follow, and that the McKinsey documents were "critical" to the theory about policies toward unrepresented claimants; remand for a new trial.
- McCallum v. Allstate Prop. & Cas. Ins. Co. (Wash. Ct. App. 2009) — the 1990s consulting engagement to analyze automobile bodily injury claims and handling procedures, summarized in the slides.
- Allstate Ins. Co. v. Scroghan, 851 N.E.2d 317, 324 (Ind. Ct. App. 2006) — the McKinsey documents and CCPR as cost-control measures aimed at reducing amounts paid on claims; relied on by the Washington court above.
- From Good Hands to Boxing Gloves (David J. Berardinelli, 2008) — the attorney-authored book that analyzes the released McKinsey documents. Cited as the origin of that phrase and as an author's characterization, not as a court finding.
- Consumer Watchdog and contemporaneous 2008 news reporting — the roughly 150,000-page public release, the Florida commissioner's suspension order and its stay on appeal, and the daily fines the company was paying in another state over the same documents. Consumer Watchdog is a nonprofit advocacy organization; cited only for the fact and circumstances of the release.
- California Department of Insurance, Consumer Complaint Study, published under California Insurance Code § 12921.1 — insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/120-company/03-concmplt · Automobile Complaint Composite Report
Reviewed by: Alex Song, Ph.D. — Researcher
Last updated: August 8, 2026
Read this first. The documents described below are from the 1990s. They became public through litigation and through the company's own release — not through a finding that anyone is breaking the law today. The courts that examined this material did not all reach the same conclusion, and this article says so plainly. What follows is a description of records that exist, and what they can tell you about the process you are in right now.
This is general information, not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship. Laws vary by state and change over time. Consult a licensed attorney in your state.
Think something here is wrong? Tell us and we will correct it: support(a)nowaccident.com