Having worked for Liberty Mutual in the late 2000s my answer back then would have been, "a fair one." Liberty used to do a fairly good job evaluating claims, knowing the difference between a case that had significant value and generic soft tissue rear end impact cases.

Times have changed however; for rear end collisions involving over $1500 in repairs or cases where it looks like the car took a good hit, they are coming in low on values. For example where once upon a time and emergency room visit followed by chiropractic care with medical bills totaling $5-6,000 you might have seen an offer of around $8-9,000, now you are seeing 5-6,000.00. Whether this is the result of an adoption of the Allstate/State Farm model of litigating most soft tissue cases unless they can be settled on the cheap or their own creation, who knows.

My real beef with them comes in their inability to distinguish between chiropractic based cases (which come in great numbers through the mill TV law firms) and cases with normal people who have soft tissue treatment through their own Primary care doctors and prescribed physical therapy. One category is often a puffed up claim, the other is real. By way of example, we tried a case to jury verdict for a client in April 2011 where the client had $5,000 in ER, primary care and physical therapy. Allstate offered $6,000.00. The jury awarded $11,5000.

At the higher end of things, Liberty is litigating every case. They got stomped on to the tune of $3 million on a premises liability case last year and paid significantly over their policy limits on two missed policy limits demand.

I realize that insurance companies want to encourage a policy of deterrence but it should not to the detriment of decent, reasonable victims who just want to be treated fairly. There is no one size fits all solution to adjusting.

To answer the original questions, you should expect Liberty Mutual's offer to be 40-60% below true jury value for legitimate cases and for chiropractic cases it is even worse.