Progressive Insurance v. Fisher
Progressive Insurance represented a motorist who killed a woman in a car accident. Progressive Insurance’s client – the one who paid Progressive money to be insured, was the woman who died. Why did Progressive represent their client’s killer? It is slightly more complex, but the one sentence answer is: When a motorist is uninsured, the insured motorist’s insurance policy kicks in if the insured is the injured party. Here, the killer was the uninsured. The deceased owned the policy with Progressive.
Such is the case with the Fisher’s. Their daughter is the deceased. Though it is a Maryland lawsuit against Progressive, the case is actually Joan Fisher, et al vs. Ronald Kevin Hope, III. Progressive Insurance is allowed to “intervene as a party defendant.” That’s what they did. It has become a PR nightmare for Progressive.
Without getting into the merits of this particular case, what I find so interesting is the way the public relations issue played out on the Internet. Seth Godin speaks about it beautifully. Companies often think they can “spin” a situation. It used to be easier to do so. Now, the truth exists, and the truth is easy to find.
Before the Internet, in order to properly show what happened in this case, a reporter would have had to go to the courthouse, find all of the case filings, and report from there. Now, you can search it on Maryland Case Search and you know all the facts. If you look in the comments of Progressive’s response, that’s what someone has done. In fact, the commenter provided a link to the Case Search results. If Progressive had wanted to hide – and I’m not saying whether they did or they didn’t, they couldn’t.
That’s what our website is about as well. Now, Progressive’s track record, in the aggregate, will appear not just on the Internet, but in Google search results. The Internet makes it harder and harder to hide. Getting the truth is so much fun, we decided we had to be a part of it. the InjuryLawyerDatabase was born.