If you’ve been in a car accident that caused only a little vehicle damage, you may have already run into this frustrating reality: insurance companies often refuse to take your injury seriously.
In fact, “light impact” or “soft tissue” injury cases are notoriously difficult to settle. Insurers tend to argue that if your car wasn’t badly damaged, you couldn’t possibly have been hurt. Sometimes, they won’t even pay for your medical bills — let alone pain and suffering.
The “Expert Witness” Problem
Recently, defense attorneys have started calling in so-called expert witnesses to testify that the vehicle’s lack of visible damage proves no one could have been injured.
Here’s the issue:
- These experts are not doctors or chiropractors.
They’re usually mechanical engineers or retired police officers who specialize in accident reconstruction — not human anatomy. They might know how a car absorbs force, but they’re not qualified to say how a human body responds to that force. - They’re not telling juries anything new. Everyone already understands that a bigger crash usually means a higher chance of injury. That’s just common sense — not expert insight.
What the Courts Are Saying
A recent case in Franklin County Common Pleas Court challenged this kind of expert testimony. The defense hired a company called Introtech to testify that based on their reconstruction, the low impact meant little or no chance of injury.
The magistrate wasn’t buying it. The court ruled that the testimony didn’t offer any information the jury didn’t already know and wasn’t helpful to the case. In short: the “expert” didn’t add value — and wasn’t medically qualified to begin with.
This reasoning lines up with other Ohio decisions, such as Azzano v. O’Malley-Clements, where the court noted:
“Jurors are capable of determining whether a plaintiff has sustained injury in a collision when presented with the details of that collision.”
In other words — juries don’t need an engineer pretending to play doctor.
When “Expert” Testimony Crosses the Line
Across multiple cases, courts have agreed that non-medical experts cannot testify about medical causation — meaning they can’t say whether a crash did or didn’t cause an injury.
Here are a few examples:
- In Smelser v. Norfolk Southern Ry. Co., the court ruled that a biomechanical engineer couldn’t testify about the specific cause of a plaintiff’s injury because it went beyond his expertise.
- In Rybaczewski v. Kingsley, the court said that while an engineer could discuss the forces involved in a crash, only a physician could determine if those forces caused injury.
- Even highly educated experts — like the Ph.D. engineer in Combs v. Norfolk and Western Ry. Co. — have been barred from giving medical opinions because they’re not doctors.
As one court put it, saying someone “couldn’t have been injured” based on vehicle damage alone is essentially practicing medicine without a license.
Why Property Damage Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
Medical research has long shown that there’s no minimum threshold of property damage that guarantees safety. Two people in identical fender-benders can have totally different outcomes depending on their body position, muscle tension, or even the direction they were looking at the moment of impact.
Studies published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics confirm that thousands of physical variables influence whether someone gets hurt — meaning property damage simply isn’t a reliable predictor of injury.
What Plaintiff Attorneys Should Do
If you’re representing an injured client in a low-impact case and the defense plans to use one of these “experts,” file a Motion in Limine to exclude their testimony.
If the court allows it anyway, have your medical expert cite the research that proves there’s no clear link between property damage and injury severity. Under Ohio law (Evid. R. 803(18)), these studies can be referenced as reliable authority.
The Bottom Line
Don’t let an insurance company or an unqualified “expert” downplay a legitimate injury. The amount of car damage doesn’t define the amount of pain someone can suffer.
Soft tissue injuries are real — and just because the car looks fine doesn’t mean the people inside walked away unharmed.
