My Car Does Not Have A Lot of Damage. Does That Mean I Was Not Hurt?

Baltimore insurance companies hire skilled, dedicated, sophisticated, and above all effective personal injury lawyer to defend claims made. Here is some tactics you you may encounter,

This classic Baltimore insurance defense argument relies on a basic principle of physics: force is required to cause damage. The insurance lawyer invariably suggests its also “common sense.” The defense lawyer posits that if the collision forces were insufficient to bend steel, crack a plastic bumper cover, or even scratch paint, then they were logically insufficient to cause significant injury to the human body. The vehicle’s bumper and structure are presented as a “black box” recorder of the crash energy. If that box is undamaged, it’s argued that the energy transferred was minimal—well below any level required to harm an occupant protected within the car’s cabin

It’s a twist on the above, with he added appeal of “science”. This argument leverages federal safety standards as a baseline. The numbers have varied over time. Let’s say bumpers are engineered to withstand impacts up to a certain speed (historically 5 MPH, now often 2.5 MPH) with “no structural damage.” The defense argues that if a vehicle’s bumper is undamaged, the impact speed must have been below this low threshold. This speed is then equated to a trivial event, like a brisk walk or a slow jog. The assertion is that an impact the vehicle was specifically designed to handle without damage could not have generated the abnormal forces necessary to injure the occupants.

This argument contextualizes the collision’s G-forces by comparing them to routine activities. This is more than an argument, as evidence, or opinion is needed. Lets’ assume an insurance defense expert testifies that the forces in a low-speed, no-damage impact are often less than or equal to those from everyday actions like plopping into an office chair, a forceful sneeze, or stepping off a curb unexpectedly. By framing the accident’s forces as commonplace and benign, the argument suggests that if a person is not injured by these daily jolts, it is highly improbable they were injured by the demonstrably minor and comparable forces of the collision. Again, the skilled defense lawyers hired by the insurance company to defeat your case will emphasize the “common sense” appeal.

When there is little or no vehicle damage, scrutiny of the medical claims intensifies. This argument distinguishes between subjective complaints (e.g., “my neck hurts”) and objective medical findings (e.g., a fracture on an X-ray or disc herniation on an MRI). The defense argues that without clear, objective evidence of a traumatic injury, the occupant’s subjective symptoms are less credible. Obviously, the success of the argument hinges, to some extent, on the believability of the injured person. The undamaged car is presented as proof that a sufficient injury mechanism was absent, suggesting the reported pain may be pre-existing, exaggerated, or unrelated to the minor traffic incident.

An insurance company thinks so, and they will hire experts to say so in court. To be fair, this is not so much and argument, as part of the defenses’ case. This is a highly technical approach that uses defense experts, typically biomechanical engineers, to establish a scientific “threshold for injury.” The expert may studies and crash-test data to assert that a specific amount of force or change in velocity (Delta−V) is required to cause a soft tissue injury like whiplash. Based on the pristine condition of the car, the expert calculates that the forces of this specific impact fell safely below that scientifically established minimum. The conclusion presented is that, from a purely biomechanical standpoint, injury was mechanistically improbable or even impossible in this event.