A $42M verdict is the price of an unverified repair

This month, a federal jury in Oklahoma ordered Progressive to pay $40 million to a Tulsa woman who was hit by an underinsured driver in 2022 — and then had to fight her own insurance company for the benefits she had already paid for. She was asking for a $25,000 policy payout. The jury's answer to how she was treated was forty million dollars.

That verdict is about an insurer, not a shop. But it's part of a pattern everyone in collision repair should be watching: when the people responsible for making a crash victim whole cut corners — a claims department, or a body shop — juries have stopped forgiving it. And our industry got its own nine-figure lesson back in 2017.

That year, a Dallas jury ordered a well-known collision center to pay $42 million after a repair that never should have left the shop. A 2010 Honda Fit had come in years earlier for hail damage. Honda's body repair manual called for the replacement roof to be welded. The shop glued it on instead. Nobody caught it. Nobody could have — there was no record of who did the work, what they were trained on, or whether anyone checked it against the OEM procedure.

Then Matthew and Marcia Seebachan bought that car, with no idea what was hiding under the paint. In a highway crash the roof failed, the structure collapsed around them, and they were trapped in the burning vehicle. They survived — with injuries that changed their lives forever. The jury put roughly 75% of the responsibility on the shop that did the repair.

The car didn't fail. The repair failed. And the repair failed because nobody could prove — or was ever asked to prove — that the person doing it was qualified to do it right.

This is why "who did the work" matters

I've spent my career around collision repair, and here's the truth everyone inside the industry knows: the skill gap between technicians is enormous, and the paperwork we hire with tells you almost nothing about it. A resume says "bodyman, 10 years." It doesn't say whether those ten years included structural work, aluminum, OEM training, or a single hour with a body repair manual. Shops are hiring blind, and every blind hire is a roll of the dice on exactly the kind of failure that ends up in front of a jury.

Meanwhile, the cars are only getting less forgiving. High-strength steel, aluminum structures, sensors and ADAS in every bumper — the margin for "close enough" is gone. The CIC and industry press talk about liability more every year, and verdicts like these are the reason.

Verification protects everyone

That's the entire idea behind Collision Passport. Every technician carries a verified digital Passport — real experience, real work, certifications and OEM training that have actually been checked. For techs, it means your skills finally count for what they're worth, and they belong to you, not to the shop you happen to work at. For shops, it means when your name is on the repair, you can prove who touched the car and what they were qualified to do.

A $40 million judgment is what unverified work costs after the crash. Verification is what it costs before: almost nothing. That's the future we're building — and it starts with the waitlist below.