Car and truck collisions
The most common injury claim in Minnesota, and the one with the most machinery attached — no-fault benefits, a statutory threshold, and coverage layers on both sides.
Nothing on this page is advice about your situation, and no article can be. If you want your own facts looked at, a Minnesota personal injury attorney can do that.
It just happened
The first days. What to do, what not to say, and which clocks have already started.
- The recorded statement: what an adjuster is doing when they ask for one
Two different companies ask for a recorded statement and the request means two different things. One duty is written into the No-Fault Act. The other is not written anywhere.
- Hit while walking or on a bicycle: the coverage question starts with a definition
A pedestrian or a cyclist struck by a car in Minnesota usually has no-fault benefits, and the reason is a definition rather than a policy. What a bicycle is, what a motorcycle is, and what happens when there is no policy anywhere are each answered in a different section of the No-Fault Act.
Who pays the bills
No-fault, health plans, liens, and the layers of coverage most people do not know they have.
- Minnesota no-fault (PIP): what it pays regardless of who caused the crash
Basic economic loss benefits are two separate buckets, not one. This is what each one covers, whose policy pays, when the payment is late, and what the insurer owes you when it is.
- Motorcycles and the No-Fault Act: the coverage a rider is presumed not to have
A motorcycle is not a motor vehicle under Minnesota's No-Fault Act, and almost everything else follows from that. The legislature was so certain riders would misunderstand it that it wrote the warning into the statute and specified the type size.
Making the claim
Fault, thresholds, damages, and what the adjuster on the other end is actually doing.
- The tort threshold: when a Minnesota crash claim can include pain and suffering
Minnesota closes off damages for noneconomic detriment in most motor vehicle cases unless one of five statutory gates opens. Four of them have nothing to do with a dollar figure, and the dollar figure is not the sum of the medical bills.
- What a traffic ticket proves: the rules of the road for people who are not in a car
Minnesota's traffic code says in terms that breaking it is not negligence per se. That one sentence changes what a citation, a crosswalk, and a bicycle's road position are worth in an injury claim — and the rules themselves say less than most people think.
When it goes wrong
Denials, lowball offers, disputed fault, and the deadlines that end a claim quietly.
- Underinsured and uninsured motorist coverage, and the notice that comes before the settlement
Minnesota requires every auto policy to carry both coverages, and a claimant's own insurer becomes the one on the other side. The measure of a UIM claim was rewritten by the legislature in 1989, and the leading case predates the rewrite.