Could AI claims settlement without a lawyer become the new norm?

By Rayne Morgan

A groundbreaking case of a legal-tech company’s artificial intelligence successfully settling a personal injury claim directly with an insurer, without the use of a lawyer, could be the start of a game-changing new trend for American consumers and the larger insurance landscape.

“We are now, for the first time, giving consumers AI to negotiate with the insurance company’s AI to reach a faster, fairer settlement without the consumer having to pay any money to an attorney or anybody else, period,” Joshua Schwadron, founder and CEO of Mighty, said.

Mighty is a New York-based company that uses AI technology to handle personal injury property/casual claims completely digitally. Its platform is free for consumers to use, helping them reach settlements faster and with less hassle — and helping insurers save on legal costs too.

Schwadron said the company was formed after he realized “a lot of the innovations that happen in personal injury are not passed onto the consumer; they are just taken by the personal injury lawyer, who often makes more money.”

“A lot of personal injury cases are straightforward and shouldn’t have a lawyer taking 33% to 40% when there’s no legal work to be done. What we are doing is bringing the innovations directly to consumers to allow them to settle directly with insurance companies and get justice after an accident,” he explained.

He added that this process is increasingly being negotiated entirely by AI, both from Mighty’s side and from the insurers to be settled with.

“When our AI agents interact with insurance companies, they often send us a disclosure that says their responses may be generated by an AI agent. In talking to industry leaders and insurance, we know that most or all insurance companies are leaning heavily on AI to help respond to and resolve personal injury claims,” Schwadron said.

“The most efficient future of resolving claims is by a consumer’s AI and an insurance company’s AI finding a fair middle ground that can result in lower costs and more efficiency for all.”

What does an AI-to-AI claim settlement look like?

Mighty is built on Open AI, the same technology powering ChatGPT. However, Mighty also has proprietary datasets and methods for updating the language model to incorporate decades of experience from claims adjusters, paralegals, lawyers and personal injury expertise.

“An accident victim comes to our software and we import their accident report, their police report, their medical records and other details. We tell them what their claim is valued at. Then, our AI agent reaches out to the auto insurer to send that information in essentially a demand package and then asks the insurer to make an offer. Our AI then works with the consumer to negotiate that offer,” Schwadron explained.

There are no humans involved from Mighty’s side, he said. If the AI agent is able to reach a successful settlement with the insurance company, or its AI, the consumer gets to keep 100% of the settlement instead of having to pay legal fees.

If Mighty’s AI agent can’t work out a resolution, it will help the consumer escalate their case to a vetted personal injury lawyer. Even this escalation process is done completely online, all through the AI agent — the consumer never has to do actual valuation, outreach to the insurance company or settling.

In Schwadron’s opinion, consumers have historically been faced with “two bad choices” after an accident: either settle directly with an auto insurer, “in which case the auto insurer is licking their chops because they are a repeat defendant who knows the tricks of the trade and is going against an unrepresented consumer,” or hire a personal lawyer and “give that lawyer 33% to 40%, even though they might not actually need legal help.”

“There has never been an alternative. There has never been a third option. Mighty has developed AI that gives a consumer a third option,” he said.

Larger impact

Looking at the bigger picture, Schwadron believes that AI-to-AI claims settlement could become more common and result in “a lot less litigation” in the future.

“Increasingly, what’s going to happen is that the straightforward cases, which are the vast majority, will be resolved with AI and only the exceptional cases will require deep human involvement,” he said.

While acknowledging that less litigation translates to “a lot fewer people needed in the claims industry,” he underscored that there will always be “cases that are complicated, where the facts are disputed, that are going to require human-level analysis and judgment.”

“I think that it will mean the insurance companies pay out lower settlements, but that consumers actually get more than they did in the old paradigm, where lawyers took a hefty chunk of a settlement that an insurance company paid out,” Schwadron said.

Rayne Morgan is a journalist, copywriter, and editor with over 10 years' combined experience in digital content and print media. You can reach her at [email protected].