Minor Impact Soft-Tissue Injury (“MIST”) Cases

Low-velocity crashes that produce minimal property damage look trivial to the untrained eye. Insurance companies and their defense lawyers have capitalized on this “common sense” argument to convince jurors that serious injury simply cannot follow a “minor impact” car crash. Since the 1990s, insurers have instructed their claims adjustors that crashes with minimal damage are unlikely or unable to cause significant or permanent injury.

Following this principle, Allstate, and later other insurance companies, began to treat claims for injury after minimal vehicle property damage crashes as fraudulent. Adjusters were told that, regardless of medical evidence of injury, the injury should not or could not have occurred because of the nature of the crash. The goal was to close the claim without payment, increasing insurance company profits significantly.

Under the MIST protocol followed by most major insurers, injury claims resulting from collisions producing $1000 or less in damage are generally “segmented,” or adjusted for minimal compensation automatically. This means that injured accident victims in these cases can expect settlement offers of little or no value. Faced with a “take it or leave it” position adopted firmly by the adjuster, many injured people likely feel that they have no choice but to accept.

Crash test studies, however, show dramatically what really happens in so-called MIST cases. Property damage has been shown to be an unreliable predictor of injury risk or outcome in low velocity crashes, and many injuries are reported in crashes of little or no property damage. We are angered by the injustice of denying certain claims routinely based on junk science.

Portland Car Accident Lawyer
Oregon law allows an injured person to recover attorney fees if demands of $7,500.00 or less are refused after a motor vehicle collision. Injuries with damages greater than this amount can be handled on a contingent fee basis, meaning that there is no attorney fee unless the case is won. There is thus no reason to hesitate to have an Oregon personal injury lawyer even in smaller cases. Our Portland car accident law firm pursues MIST cases aggressively and offers a free consultation with a lawyer dedicating to protecting legal rights and recovering full and fair compensation. Contact us at (503) 975-8298 or online.