If you settle most of your personal injury cases, you need to know the specific factors that are provided value by insurance companies. One of the Top 5 value drivers is a claim for Duties Under Duress.
"Duties Under Duress" is a unique term used within insurance company bodily injury software (Colossus, ClaimIQ, Liability Navigator) used to evaluate bodily injury claims in auto, premises liability and workers compensation claims.
As discussed in Trial Guides' first book Colossus: What Every Trial Lawyer Needs to Know, the original programmers of Colossus, and Liability Navigator, used the term "Duties Under Duress" as a replacement for providing value on medically determined disability claims. Disability as determined by doctors using forms such as the Neck Disability Index or Oswestry Low Back Disability Questionnaire, is provided no value by the bodily injury software used by insurers.
A claimant must have experienced pain while conducting one of several activities, had that noted in the medical records, and then the lawyer must make a specific claim for Duties Under Duress. Trial Guides founder, and author of the Colossus text, discusses this in a new blog post at the Settlement Intelligence web site.
Trial Guides' Colossus: Lawyer Forms is the only source for the "Duties Under Duress" form and Aaron DeShaw's other forms used to obtain higher settlement offers. These forms were reverse engineered from original programming notes for the insurance software as well as early drafts of user manuals, allowing DeShaw to provide lawyers with the factors or "value drivers" actually used to evaluate claims.
These forms are protected by a registered federal trademark and the content cannot be used by law firms or software without a license from Trial Guides.