A driver stopped at a light on Northwest Expressway gets hit from behind at low speed, declines the ambulance, and goes to an urgent care two days later with neck stiffness. She is referred to a chiropractor, attends eleven visits over six weeks, stops for a month when her insurance card question goes unresolved, then returns for three more. She misses four shifts. The bills come to a few thousand dollars, the repair estimate to a bit more, and the first offer from the other driver's carrier arrives well under the total of the two. That number was assembled, not guessed, and the parts are identifiable.
The three columns that can be counted
Medical specials are the billed charges from every provider, and they are the spine of the file: the emergency room, the imaging center, the physical therapist, the orthopedist who read the MRI. Wage loss is separate, and it is proved by an employer letter stating the hourly rate, the shifts missed and the dates, or by tax returns and invoices if the claimant works for herself. Property damage runs on its own track, usually settled first, and the repair estimate or total loss valuation rarely touches the injury figure directly. What it does touch is the adjuster's sense of impact severity, which is why photographs of a crushed bumper matter more than most people expect.
What the software reads in the records
Most large carriers run bodily injury files through claims evaluation software that ingests the medical records and the billing codes rather than the narrative. It reads diagnosis codes, procedure codes, the number of visits, the interval between the crash and the first treatment, and the length of any break in care. A soft tissue diagnosis treated conservatively for six weeks produces one range. The same diagnosis with a documented radicular finding, an injection and a surgical consult produces another. The thirty day gap in the chiropractic course is read as improvement or noncompliance, not as a billing dispute, unless something in the record says otherwise in writing.
Where the fault percentage shows up
Oklahoma applies modified comparative negligence with a bar at fifty one percent, which means a claimant whose share of fault exceeds that of everyone else combined recovers nothing, and a claimant found twenty percent at fault recovers eighty percent of the value. Adjusters apply this long before a jury would. It appears not as an argument but as a line: a full valuation of, say, a certain range, then a deduction for the claimant's assessed share. Sudden stops, following distance, a lane change noted in the officer's narrative and a citation issued or declined all feed that percentage. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is responsible for federal crash data and vehicle safety standards, and the crash report categories carriers rely on descend from that reporting framework.
Documents that move it against arguments that never do
A careful reader learns the difference quickly. What moves a number is paper: complete records from every provider rather than a summary, the radiologist's report rather than the referral note, an employer letter on letterhead with dates and rate, a physician's written explanation for the gap in care, a mileage log, out of pocket receipts, and photographs taken before the vehicle went to auction. What does not move a number is the claimant's own account of how frightening the crash was, an assertion that the other driver was rude at the scene, a comparison to a friend's settlement in a different state, or a threat delivered by telephone and never put in writing.
The distinction is not about fairness, it is about what the file can carry. An adjuster's authority is granted against documented value, and a supervisor reviewing an increase wants to see the item that justified it. So a letter enclosing the missing four pages of the orthopedic chart, with the relevant finding identified by date, tends to produce movement, while the same call made without the pages produces a repeat of the original figure. Where the fault percentage is the problem, the material that changes it is the crash report supplement, the scene photographs and any independent witness statement, obtained early while memories and skid marks still exist.
The offer that lands first is a starting position built from codes, dates and a fault estimate made on thin information. Each of those three inputs can be corrected, and correcting them is mostly a matter of sending the right document with the right sentence attached. Read the offer as a set of assumptions, then check them one at a time.
