I suppose it’s fine to shed a few tears over having to actually honor your policies and provide the benefits your insureds pay for. The vast majority of claims—whether from businesses, individuals, or third parties who aren’t made whole by any settlement—are met with resistance because a settlement is always a compromise. And a jury trial? Always a risk. But your game isn’t about fairness; it’s about ensuring that the rightful value of a claim is never restored if you can help it. Because in your world, the worth of a person or company isn’t determined by what’s just—it’s dictated by what you can get away with.
Of course, losing a handful of jury verdicts is just the cost of doing business when you can grind down thousands of other claimants with your playbook: delay, deny, defend. That strategy maximizes your profits by making reasonable resolutions so exhausting and unattainable that most people give up long before they ever see a courtroom.
Insurance is the most profitable industry in human history. Why? Because you don’t exist to provide coverage—you exist to make sure as little of it as possible ever gets paid out. And now, you’re mad that attorneys and advocacy groups advertise? That jurors might see a big award and start to think it’s the norm? The truth is, those verdicts only happen when you miscalculate and refuse to settle early for far less. Nothing goes to trial unless it’s a calculated risk, designed to make litigation so daunting that people abandon their claims entirely.
And yet, while you whine about a plaintiff’s lawyer spending $2 million on billboards, how much does Zurich or any other major insurer spend on “educating” clients, judges, and claims reps not to ensure fair payouts, but to discourage people from seeking representation in the first place? To rewrite the narrative so that claimants feel guilty or greedy for demanding what they’re owed under policies you wrote and sold to them?? For trusting you? Enough bull. Your list of sins and horrors in claims practices continues to grow. Zurich is particularly bad, but not the worst- and they have an entire podcast series without one guest from the opposite side of this story…gestures exclusives with out of touch Zurich executives and strategic risk leaders, skilled minds in litigation policies and regulatory and legislative affairs positions. How fair and balanced!
No one forced these contracts on you. You wrote them. You priced them. You collected premiums for them. But the moment someone actually needs the coverage they paid for, you make it a war of attrition.
If anything, we need tort reform in the opposite direction—more plaintiffs should be suing. In California alone, the number of cases is ten times lower than it was a decade ago. Why? Because you’ve made it so grueling that only the biggest, most airtight claims are worth the fight. And eeven then, claimants often spend years battling you just to be made whole, while their attorneys work on contingency and end up taking 40%—a cut they earn for fronting the risk and resources against an industry that spends billions ensuring the deck is stacked against the people it supposedly serves.
You hate punitive damages because they’re the one thing that actually forces accountability. But that’s exactly why jurors should use them—to remind you that risk isn’t just something your policyholders carry. It’s the only language you people understand.
Your industry is a masterclass in corporate gaslighting, a monument to greed, and a stain on capitalism. And frankly? You all make me sick.
