The Peggy Project
The Peggy Project
The business purpose of this Mark’s Claims is to introduce you to a long series on how to hold people economically responsible for their contribution in causing a car crash.?We know it as Comparative Negligence (Comp Neg).
But before we talk about how to identify, assess and negotiate Comp Neg, I want to tell you about why it is important to me.
There used to be a series on the radio called “The Rest of the Story” that often talked about how companies start and why. This is ours.
It begins and ends with a tough question:
Would the child you were be proud of the adult you are?
My cousin was 11 years older than me, lived in another state, and I did not know her well.?
We packed up the family station wagon Friday afternoon and drove the four hours after my dad finished his day early at State Farm’s regional office.?Her wedding weekend was the social event of our year and the excitement when we arrived at the rehearsal felt overwhelming for a shy midwestern kid who could never remember being at such a celebration.
The adults stayed up late and, with all the beds spoken for, we were left to the living room floor.?Aunt Jean put bath towels down as improvised mattresses and we finally fell to sleep on the pillows we had brought.??
The shrieks of pain that woke us several hours later haunt me now, nearly 50 years since.?On the eve of her nuptials, a county worker at the end of his shift made an untimely turn and our beautiful Peggy was killed in a car crash. She was gone, just like that.?
“We came for the wedding and stayed for the funeral,” my mom remembered years later.
The raw emotion of the days that followed left a permanent mark on all of us. At church the groom tried to both lift her out of the coffin and lay in it with her. At the funeral home they ran out of Kleenex and put out rolls of toilet paper instead that I picked up and carried around, constantly tearing off and passing out chunks while trying to figure out why I was the only one not crying.?At home her mother took to bed for weeks while her favorite uncle crawled into a bottle.?He never really came out. ?
35 years later when I asked Peggy's brother about her he quickly turned away. "I'm sorry," Bob said over his shoulder with tears in his eyes. "It's just too soon."
I spent the tragic week investigating my first liability issue.?I asked so many questions of so many people my aunt finally told me to shush.?“It doesn’t really matter how it happened,” she said.?Yet it did to me.?
Could it have been prevented?
I made an admittedly childish but nevertheless solemn vow that if I ever got the chance, when I was an adult, I would do everything I could so that no other family would experience what we had to go through.?
That pledge, that promise, was not at all forgotten, just kind of lost in girls and guitars and growing up. Until fate struck.
Fast forward 122 months and I was in trouble.?As a rookie insurance adjuster, I had misapplied Indiana’s new Modified Comparative Negligence law and the insurance department complaint on my bosses’ desk was sure to lead to my termination.?In an amazing twist - instead of getting fired - I was promoted and ultimately put in charge of developing a training program for auto liability.??“Make sure no one else screws it up as bad as you did,” my boss growled when he gave me the assignment.
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Weeks later in a dusty law library doing project research I was studying the Rules of the Road when I unexpectedly found something else, something that changed my career and my life.
It was the promise I had lost.
The more I learned the more I realized that the laws, if strictly followed, would eliminate nearly all accidents.?I discovered where the statutes explicitly mandated defensive driving in the duties to control speed, to look out, and to avoid.?I was most struck by the obscure Illinois passing on the left law that - if followed - would have saved her (625 5/11-703(b)).
I realized that holding people responsible for their fault in an insurance claim - especially when they had the right of way - could make them better, safer drivers.
Empowered and motivated beyond belief, I taught that?defensive driving isn’t just a good idea, it's the law! Anyone in my orbit was going to hear about it and do everything in their power to enforce it. My experience showed that while Comp Neg is Tough Love, it is still Love - and the right thing to do as a Claim Rep.
Put into practice with my teams we proved that holding people economically responsible for their shared responsibility in an insurance claim taught drivers to be more cautious. To slow down.?To pay attention. ?I kept working the problem.
A dozen years later my passion caught the attention of a senior exec at Allstate. She asked me to take these concepts and turn them into a software application, and I taught myself to program.?In a few months we will be completing the next major release of that auto liability investigation and assessment system that you’ve known for 20 years as Claim Toolkit for Auto.?
But if you could open the code and knew where to look you’d know it really is: ‘The Peggy Project – Version 9.0’.
A project whose primary goal is to improve driving safety through better application of Comparative Negligence and whose secondary goal is keeping the solemn vow of a devastated 12-year-old boy who – I believe - would be proud of the man he became. ?
And that’s “The Rest of the Story” of how Claim Toolkit started.
Over the next year I am going to tell you everything I learned about Auto Liability in the 35 years I have been working The Peggy Project:
The Peggy Project was born when I learned I really could do something about traffic safety. ?You can, too. Won't you please join me?
Over this series of articles, I know you’ll learn at least one law, one truth, that will help you teach someone a lesson about driving safety in a way they will remember - through their pocketbook.
When you do, you’ll make that person an official beneficiary of The Peggy Project.
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