Revealing Hidden Cost
to Consumers of Auto Litigation Inflation

September 4, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

By William Nibbelin, Senior Research Actuary, Triple-I

Motor vehicle tort cases in federal and state courts generated $42.8 billion in “excess value” from 2014 to 2023, according to new analysis by Triple-I.

“Excess value” may sound like a good thing, but it’s not. It represents an additional cost of motor vehicle civil litigation – above and beyond what it would have been if prior trends in court filings had continued. From 1995 to 2007, filings declined, and from 2007 to 2014 they were flat.

The report illustrates the impact of litigation inflation on insurance premiums for all drivers. It also underscores the challenges related to accurately quantifying and comparing state-by-state experience.

Lawsuits push premium up

As Triple-I has previously reported, litigation trends are a major force driving up auto insurance premiums. As claims costs rise – whether due to rising repair costs, litigation, or other factors – premiums must increase to ensure that insurers have enough policyholder surplus to pay future, higher claims.

Policyholder surplus is not a nice-to-have extra. It is the money state regulators require insurers to maintain so they will be able to keep their promises to pay policyholders. In addition, credit rating agencies expect insurers to keep even larger surpluses than the states mandate to enable the insurers to borrow at more favorable interest rates when needed.

Interestingly, motor vehicle tort settlement amounts appear to have decreased on average between 2014 and 2023. While actual settlement amounts are not reported, the “amount in controversy” – legalese for the amount demanded by the plaintiff – serves as a proxy for filings disposed as settlements. The average amount in controversy decreased from $748,000 in the first of the three decades under consideration to $674,000 in the third.

However, the increased volume of cases during the period drove the overall excess value to $984.6 million at the federal level alone.

State courts present a challenge

The report estimates that state courts handled approximately 5.0 million motor vehicle tort cases from 2014 to 2023, generating an excess value of $41.8 billion – dwarfing the federal court impact. This analysis, however, is challenged by the state-by-state variety of definitions and criteria for data collection.

“Because states maintain different definitions and criteria for data collection, most state civil case data is either unavailable or incomplete,” the report says.

The report concludes that its findings align with previous research by Triple-I and the Casualty Actuarial Society, which quantified increasing inflation on auto liability insurance at $118.9 billion for 2014-2023, representing both litigation and economic inflation.

“As we continue to analyze the evolving landscape of motor vehicle litigation, it’s clear that a deeper, data-driven understanding of both national and state trends is crucial,” said Patrick Schmid, Triple-I’s chief insurance officer. “Only with more transparent and comprehensive data can we craft effective solutions that benefit both policyholders and the broader insurance market. Future research should focus on bridging the gaps in state-level information and exploring the causal factors behind rising litigation and its impacts.”

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Homeowners Insurance, Risk Management, Roof Condition, Technology

Easing Home Upkeep to Control Insurance Costs

September 4, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

By Lewis Nibbelin, Contributing Writer, Triple-I

With home repair and remodeling costs rising 61 percent over the past decade, many homeowners are delaying or forgoing routine maintenance for older homes. In a recent Executive Exchange discussion with Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan, PreFix founder and CEO James Bilodeau discussed how his Texas-based company can help insurers promote such maintenance to mitigate more expensive losses down the line.

PreFix pairs clients with individual repair technicians to deliver personalized, year-round home repair, including two annual maintenance visits for filter replacements and comprehensive home inspections, Bilodeau said.

For maintenance visits, Bilodeau explained, PreFix will “clean your AC condenser and condensate line; change your air and water filters; flush the sediment out of your water heater; clean the lint out of your dryer outtake; sanitize your washer and dishwasher with a natural cleansing agent; and change all the batteries in your smoke alarms,” among other tasks.

The firm also modifies its services based on insurer preferences and the specific risk profile of homes in a given area.

“We’re able to offer highly granular customized data collection on all of the homes that we service through direct observation of issues that can correlate to non-cat losses,” Bilodeau said, noting identification of corroded water valves, overhanging tree branches, and unsecured exterior doors can facilitate “resolution quickly, before extensive damage happens.”

By continuously monitoring and mitigating these risks, Bilodeau believes his firm can help lower underwriting costs and premiums, as well as support smart home telematics adoption and catastrophe risk modeling.

“While aggregation is useful – which is what many providers do – many of the component inputs like home inspection data degrade quickly over two to five years,” Bilodeau said. “Inaccuracy can then be exacerbated when the data is extrapolated to other homes using inference.”

Kevelighan added that initial inspections as part of the home buying process often overlook or fail to communicate the true risks a property faces, leaving homeowners unaware of risks until catastrophe strikes.

“If you can enter risk management into the process of home purchasing much sooner and help the customer understand what they are purchasing beyond the four walls of their house and the community that it’s in, that could very much create a win-win for the insurer and the customer,” Kevelighan said.

Kevelighan and Bilodeau agreed that removing friction from home maintenance is imperative not only to better accommodate consumers, but to facilitate the insurance industry’s shift beyond repairing and replacing damaged property to predicting and preventing damage to begin with. Solutions like PreFix highlight how proactive loss mitigation necessarily involves engages all affected parties that have a stake in mitigation and resilience.

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Survey: Homeowners See Value of Aerial Imagery for Insurers; Education Key to Comfort Levels

August 20, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

Among homeowners surveyed by the Insurance Research Council (IRC), 88 percent recognize that aerial imagery is a beneficial tool for insurers.

Nearly all respondents said they recognize the value of using satellite, drone, and aircraft images for early problem detection, claims processing, and hazard identification before costly damage occurs. Most also said they believe aerial imaging can lead to fairer pricing.

Key findings:

Nine out of 10 respondents said they see at least one benefit from aerial imagery’s use in insurance. More than half said it leads to fairer insurance pricing.
While 60 percent have some awareness that insurers use aerial imagery, 40 percent know little or nothing about it.
When homeowners are familiar with the use of aerial imagery for underwriting, they are nearly twice as likely to think it makes insurance pricing fairer.
Homeowners worry more about accuracy than privacy in the context of aerial imagery. Accuracy emerges as the top individual concern, with 31 percent citing it as their biggest worry, compared to 24 percent who cite privacy as their primary concern.

Education and transparency are key to acceptance of this technology, the survey found. Homeowners who were already familiar with aerial imagery applications were found to show consistently higher confidence levels, greater benefit recognition, and more positive sentiment across all insurance uses. Younger homeowners also demonstrated greater acceptance and higher confidence in the technology’s accuracy.

“Consumers see value in aerial imagery when they understand how it’s used in insurance,” said IRC President Pat Schmid. “Efforts to increase transparency and consumer knowledge can bridge the confidence gap, improve customer trust, and help homeowners realize the benefits of faster claims, fairer pricing, and better risk prevention.”

The IRC, like Triple-I, is an affiliate of The Institutes.

Catastrophes, Coastal Property, Disaster Preparedness, Disaster Resilience, Flood Insurance, Floods, Homeowners Insurance, Hurricane, Lightning, Market Conditions, Severe Convective Storm, Technology, Wildfire, Wind

Nonprofit to Rescue NOAA Billion-Dollar Dataset

August 13, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

A climate nonprofit plans to revive a key federal database tracking billion-dollar weather and climate disasters that the Trump Administration stopped updating in May, Bloomberg reported.

The database captures the financial toll of increasingly intense weather events and was used by insurers and others to understand, model, and predict weather perils across the United States. Dr. Adam B. Smith, the former NOAA climatologist who spearheaded the database for more than a decade, has been hired to manage it for the nonprofit, Climate Central.

NOAA in May announced it would stop tracking the cost of the country’s most expensive disasters, those which cause at least $1 billion in damage – a move that would leave insurers, researchers, and government policymakers with less reliable information to help understand the patterns of major disasters like hurricanes, drought or wildfires, and their economic consequences.

Climate Central plans to expand beyond the database’s original scope by tracking disasters as small as $100 million and calculating losses from individual wildfires, rather than simply reporting seasonal regional totals.

A record 28 billion-dollar disasters hit the United States in 2023, including a drought that caused $14.8 billion in damages. In 2024, 27 incidents of that scale occurred. Since 1980, an average of nine such events have struck in the United States annually.

This summer – amid deadly wildfires and floods – the Trump Administration has appeared to be rolling back some of its DOGE-driven NOAA funding cuts. NOAA recently announced that it would be hiring 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians for the National Weather Service (NWS), after having terminated over 550 such positions in the already-understaffed agency in the spring.

In addition, the administration’s announced termination of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program — run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — has been held up by a court injunction while legislators debate its future. Congress established BRIC through the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 to ensure a stable funding source to support mitigation projects annually. The program has allocated more than $5 billion for investment in mitigation projects to alleviate human suffering and avoid economic losses from floods, wildfires, and other disasters.

Regarding the rescue of the NOAA dataset, Colorado State University researcher and Triple-I non-resident scholar Dr. Phil Klotzbach said, “The billion-dollar disaster dataset is important for those of us working to better understand the impacts of tropical cyclones. It uses a consistent methodology to estimate damage caused by natural disasters from 1980 to the present and was a critical input to our papers investigating the relationship between landfalling wind, pressure and damage. I’m very happy to hear that this dataset will continue!”

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Some Weather Service Jobs Being Restored;
BRIC Still Being Litigated

August 13, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

Amid a summer full of deadly fires and storm-related flooding, the Trump Administration appears to be rolling back some of the spending cuts imposed upon the National Weather Service (NWS) by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – of which NWS is a part – announced at an internal all-hands meeting earlier this month that they will hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians. CNN reported the announcement, citing an unnamed NOAA official. In jointly timed press releases, Congressmen Mike Flood and Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.) and Mike Flood (R-Neb.) acknowledged the planned hirings.

While the decision is welcome news, both congressmen continued to urge their colleagues to pass their bipartisan Weather Workforce Improvement Act to ensure these positions will remain permanent and not be subject to any future reductions.

“For months, Congressman Flood and I have been fighting to get NOAA and NWS employees the support they need in the face of cuts to staff and funding,” Sorenson said. “Hundreds of unfilled positions have caused NWS offices across the country to cancel weather balloon launches, forgo overnight staffing, and force remaining meteorologists to overwork themselves.”

“For decades the National Weather Service has helped keep our communities safe with accurate and timely forecasts,” said Flood, adding that the NOAA announcement “sends a message that they’re focused on strengthening the NWS for years to come.”

NOAA and FEMA cuts raised fears

It’s not just the NOAA and NWS cuts that have raised concerns. On April 4, 2025, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that it would be ending its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program and cancel all BRIC applications from fiscal years 2020-2023. Congress established BRIC through the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 to ensure a stable funding source to support mitigation projects annually. The program has allocated more than $5 billion for investment in mitigation projects to alleviate human suffering and avoid economic losses from floods, wildfires, and other disasters.

At the time, Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), called the decision to terminate BRIC “beyond reckless.”

“Although ASFPM has had some qualms about how FEMA’s BRIC program was implemented, it was still a cornerstone of our nation’s hazard mitigation strategy, and the agency has worked to make improvements each year,” Berginnis said. “Eliminating it entirely — mid-award cycle, no less — defies common sense.”

Resilience investment is key to long-term insurance availability and affordability. Average insured catastrophe losses have been on the rise for decades, reflecting a combination of climate-related factors and demographic trends as more people have moved into harm’s way.

Efforts have been made to save BRIC, and a U.S. District Judge in Boston recently granted a preliminary injunction sought by 20 Democrat-led states while their lawsuit over the funding moves ahead. Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled the Trump Administration cannot reallocate $4 billion meant to help communities protect against natural disasters.

In his ruling, Stearns said he was not convinced Congress had given FEMA any discretion to redirect the funds. The states had also shown that the “balance of hardship and public interest” was in their favor.

“There is an inherent public interest in ensuring that the government follows the law, and the potential hardship accruing to the States from the funds being repurposed is great,” Stearns wrote. “The BRIC program is designed to protect against natural disasters and save lives.”

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2025 Cat Losses to Date
Are 2nd-Costliest Since Records Have Been Kept

August 13, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

Global insured losses from natural catastrophes reached $80 billion in the first six months of 2025 alone, making it the second-costliest first half on record since data collection began decades ago, according to reports by reinsurance giants Munich Re and Swiss Re.

Both reports called out the devastating wildfires that swept through Los Angeles County in January as the single most destructive event to date, with both firms estimating that these fires caused $40 billion in insured losses.

What makes these disasters particularly alarming is their timing and location. Both reports emphasized that the Los Angeles fires occurred during California’s normally wet winter season, when such massive blazes are typically unheard of. This seasonal shift represents a troubling new pattern, in which dangerous fire conditions persist year-round, rather than just during traditional fire season.

The reports also agree that severe thunderstorms across the American Midwest and South continued to cause billions in additional damage throughout spring, reinforcing how weather-related disasters are becoming both more frequent and more costly as communities expand into high-risk areas.

Swiss Re and Munich Re both identify the same underlying drivers making these disasters so expensive: More people are building homes and businesses in dangerous areas like wildfire-prone zones and tornado alleys, while climate change is making extreme weather events more intense and unpredictable.

The reports agree that this combination of increased development in risky locations and worsening weather conditions means that what happened in the first half of 2025 is likely just a preview of even costlier disasters to come, unless communities take serious steps to build more resilient infrastructure and avoid construction in the most hazardous areas.

Cat losses and replacement costs

Swiss Re emphasized the growing wildfire threat, pointing out that, before 2015, wildfires on average contributed around 1 percent of the total insured losses from all natural catastrophes worldwide.

“In the last 10 years, this has risen to 7 percent, the costliest periods being a two-year stretch of 2017‒18, and to a lesser extent 2020,” the report said.

Swiss Re also points to severe impact of post-pandemic construction cost inflation, noting that “construction costs rose by 35.64 percent from January 2020 to June 2025, directly impacting property claims costs.” These higher costs to repair and replace property significantly increase the financial impact of each disaster.

“The best way to avoid losses is to implement effective preventive measures, such as more robust construction for buildings and infrastructure to better withstand natural disasters,” said Thomas Blunck, a member of Munich Re’s Board of Management. “Such precautions can help to maintain reasonable insurance premiums, even in high-risk areas. And most importantly: to reduce future exposure, new building development should not be allowed in high-risk areas.”

Swiss Re cautions that climate change is creating more volatile and unpredictable loss patterns, making catastrophe losses “more difficult to predict.” Together, these trends suggest the U.S. insurance market must prepare for sustained pressure on pricing and availability, particularly in high-risk coastal and wildland-urban interface regions.

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Auto Insurance, Insurers and the Economy, Legal Environment, Market Conditions

Auto Premium Growth Slows As Policyholders Shop Around, Study Says

August 11, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

Improved loss ratios, strong premium growth, and lower retention rates characterized the U.S. auto insurance industry in 2024, according to LexisNexis® Risk Solutions’ 2025 U.S Auto Insurance Trends Report.

The report shows that, “while a number of insurers returned to profitability as the market softened,” the market was characterized by “record levels of policy shopping and switching, attorney representation, claims severity, and rising driving violations.”

Rate increases over the past two years helped U.S. insurers address profitability issues, the report said. Premium rate increases are beginning to ease, rising 10 percent in 2024, compared with a 15 percent hike in 2023, as market conditions soften. Insurer profitability is improving, with direct written premiums growing 13.6 percent, to $359 billion, and incurred loss ratios stabilizing, enabling some carriers to pursue growth strategies and file for rate decreases.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions also notes that tariffs may factor into how insurers consider rate in 2025. While the market wouldn’t expect the magnitude of activity seen between 2022 through 2024, tariffs, if they stick, could set off a ripple effect of moderate rate increases with implications across the industry.

Other trends identified in the report include:

Bodily injury claims severity jumped 9.2 percent, and property damage severity climbed 2.5 percent, year over year. In contrast, collision severity fell 2.5 percent for the same period.
All driving violations increased 17percent and driving violation rates across the United States surpassed 2019 levels.
Policy shopping reached an all-time high, with more than 45 percent of policies in force shopped at least once by year-end.

The report also noted that electric vehicle (EV) transitions are introducing new risks, as drivers moving from internal combustion engine vehicles to EVs experienced a 14 percet rise in claim frequency.

“Auto insurers continue to navigate a dynamic market,” said Jeff Batiste, senior vice president and general manager, U.S. auto and home insurance, LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “The combination of the market softening and a return to profitability presents a potential new chapter for the industry as insurers encounter a consumer base that is more willing than ever to shop for deals.”

Record levels of auto policy switching translated to 2024’s new policy growth rate of 17.7 percent year over year. It also added momentum to the ongoing customer retention decline across the industry.

Since 2021, retention has decreased five percentage points, to 78 percent, resulting in a 22 percent increase in policy churn, the report says.

“Historically, dropping even one percentage point is significant,” it says. “However, against a backdrop of heightened levels of shopping and switching activity, insurers may want to focus on their retention strategies, especially when long-tenured customers are hitting the market.”

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CSU Sticks to Hurricane Season Forecast, Warns About Near-Term Activity

August 7, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

Colorado State University researchers are standing by their prediction for a “slightly above-average” 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, while warning of heightened tropical activity over the next two weeks.

Led by Dr. Phil Klotzbach, senior research scientist at CSU and Triple-I non-resident scholar, the team maintains their forecast of 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, and three major hurricanes through November 30. The forecast calls for 115 percent of average hurricane activity compared to the 1991-2020 baseline, a decrease from 2024’s 130 percent. However, the immediate outlook is more concerning, with a 55 percent chance of above-normal activity through August 19.

Current activity includes Tropical Storm Dexter, which formed off North Carolina on August 3 and may strengthen to Category 1 status as it moves into the Central Atlantic. The National Hurricane Center is also monitoring a new system labeled Invest 96L in the Eastern Atlantic. The term “invest” is a naming convention used by the National Hurricane Center to identify a system that could develop into a tropical depression or tropical storm within the next seven days. The designation allows the agency to run specialized computer forecast models to track the area’s potential storm development.

The heightened forecast stems from unusually warm tropical Atlantic waters.

“Weaker winds over the past few weeks have reduced evaporation and ocean mixing, leading to faster warming,” Klotzbach explained. These warmer waters provide more fuel for hurricane development and create atmospheric conditions that favor storm formation.

Major hurricane landfall probabilities remain elevated: 48 percent for the entire continental U.S. coastline, 24 percent for the East Coast, and 31 percent for the Gulf Coast — all above historical averages.

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Auto Insurance, Highway Safety, Technology

Parents Eye IoT
to Address Perils
of Teen Driving

August 6, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

Parents are increasingly open to using technology to keep their teen drivers safe on the road, a recent survey from Nationwide finds.

The survey found 4 out of 5 parents would enroll their teens in telematics programs that reward safe driving. This enthusiasm for tech-based solutions comes despite mixed parental assessments of their teens’ driving abilities: While 42 percent rate their teen’s driving as “good” or “excellent”, similar percentages express concerns about distracted driving and reckless behavior.

“Parents want to feel confident that their teens are making smart choices behind the wheel,” says Casey Kempton, Nationwide president of P&C personal lines. “These tools help make that possible—not just by monitoring behavior, but by encouraging better habits through positive reinforcement.”

Despite recognizing the value of safety technology, adoption remains limited. While 96 percent of parents said they believe dashcams provide valuable evidence after accidents, only 26 percent of teen drivers actually have them installed.

The survey reveals a broader trend in which consumers are drawn to telematics and monitoring technologies, though motivations vary. While parents prioritize safety benefits, many consumers are equally interested in the insurance premium discounts these programs can provide.

“This isn’t just about technology,” Kempton says. “It’s about creating a culture of accountability and shared responsibility on the road.”

As comfort with AI-enabled monitoring grows, it appears that families are embracing a future in which technology supports — but does not replace — good judgment.

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Russia Quake Highlights Unpredictability of Natural Catastrophes

July 30, 2025 Jeff Dunsavage Leave a comment

Yesterday’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula sent tsunami waves across the Pacific, placing Hawaii under evacuation orders, triggering advisories along the U.S. West Coast, and emphasizing a critical truth about natural catastrophes: They don’t respect borders and tend not to give warnings.

While the immediate impacts were relatively contained—with waves reaching up to 4 meters in Russia’s coastal towns and smaller surges affecting Japan, Hawaii, and Alaska—the event offers a potent and timely reminder about the importance of preparation and investment in resilience.

Coverage Confusion That Could Cost

Standard homeowners insurance policies don’t cover tsunami damage. Neither do earthquake policies, despite the seismic trigger. Tsunami damage falls under flood coverage—a separate policy that many coastal property owners don’t carry.

Flood insurance purchase rates nationally are low – even in coastal communities. This creates a potential perfect storm of financial vulnerability. Communities that experienced evacuation orders yesterday, from Oahu to the Oregon coast might well have been saddled with massive, largely uninsured losses had the tsunami played out differently.

Low Frequency, High Consequence

Tsunami risk represents the most challenging category of natural disasters: extremely rare but potentially catastrophic. Unlike hurricanes or earthquakes that occur with some regularity, major tsunamis affecting U.S. coastlines are generational events. This rarity can breed complacency.

Yesterday’s event, while not causing major damage to U.S. properties, provided invaluable data for catastrophe modelers. The wave propagation patterns, arrival times, and coastal impacts across Hawaii, Alaska, and the West Coast offer fresh insights into how a more severe event might unfold. Insurers and reinsurers are likely already incorporating this data into their risk models.

Building Resilience Through Partnership

The beauty of a “predict and prevent” model of risk management is that it can address a multiplicity of perils. While tsunamis are rare, flooding is not. Recent years have witnessed a rise in inland flooding related to tropical storms, atmospheric rivers, and severe convective storms. The communities affected by catastrophic flood events like the recent ones in Texas and New Mexico and the devastating 2024 floods related to Hurricane Helene tend to have even lower flood insurance “take-up” rates than coastal communities.

The most effective risk management will require unprecedented collaboration between public and private sectors. The NFIP, state insurance departments, and private insurers need to work together on pricing models that accurately reflect risk while remaining accessible to coastal communities. At the same time, communities and businesses must plan and invest together to prepare not just one but many potential climate-related risks.

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