Who Writes the Repair Plan? Industry Experts Push Back Against Insurer Estimate Control
A high-profile Texas personal injury lawsuit has reignited a debate that collision repairers deal with every day: when an insurer dictates how a car gets fixed, who bears the liability when the repair goes wrong? For the Alliance of Automotive Service Providers of New Jersey, the case was a clear wake-up call — not just for shops, but for the insurance industry's fundamental misunderstanding of its own role.
The Texas Case That Lit the Fire
Dallas attorney Todd Tracy made headlines when he announced a lawsuit against Dallas-based John Eagle Collision Center, alleging that the shop's failure to follow Honda's OEM roof replacement procedures contributed to his clients — Matthew and Marcia Seebachan — being trapped in a burning 2010 Honda Fit following a collision. Tracy, who normally targets OEMs for alleged product defects, was now pointing at a collision shop, and the Seebachans were also preparing to reopen a case against State Farm alleging that insurer pressure led to the shop's use of adhesive in place of the welds Honda requires.
"As far as the facts of the case go, nobody's going to know what the real truths are until this gets to court," said AASP-NJ President Jeff McDowell. "This is definitely a big wake-up call to the industry as a whole — not just to the collision repairers, but to the insurance industry as well."
A deposition from the shop's representative captured the core tension in a single exchange:
Q: As a certified body shop, you have to — the insurance company cannot trump the OEM specifications, correct, sir?
A: Yes, they can.
Q: Where does it say that?
A: By not paying the bill.
That exchange resonated across the industry because it describes what many shops experience daily.
The Industry's Role Structure: What It Should Look Like
AASP-NJ Executive Director Charles Bryant laid out the correct framework plainly: "The shops should be the ones deciding what it takes to repair the car, and they should be getting paid to do it."
His statement went further: "I think it's very important someone addresses situations of insurance companies dictating how cars get repaired and limiting payment to what they want to pay for. That's a job for qualified collision repair shops. The job of the insurer is to insure, but also to pay for these cars to be repaired correctly and safely — not to come out and dictate."
Vehicle Information Services attorney Erica Eversman described the correct breakdown of responsibilities on a recent "Repair University Live": an adjuster's job is to identify fraud, establish the scope of damage from the loss, and determine the reserve amount the carrier needs to fund the claim. The shop's job is to determine how to fix the car correctly and execute that repair. The customer's job is to be made whole.
Insurers have confused their financial estimate — which is intended to guide their own accounting — with a repair directive. As Eversman put it, if a shop repairs a car based solely on an insurer's estimate, the shop is still liable for that repair. "You're the professional repairer."
The Problem With Rekeying Insurer Estimates
One common practice that Eversman has strongly cautioned against is rekeying an insurance company's estimate into the shop's own estimating system — even when the shop intends to correct all the errors before finalizing the document.
The problem is what an outside observer sees: the shop's system contains an insurance company estimate as the starting document. In a negligence lawsuit, that document is discoverable, and a plaintiff's attorney can use it to argue that the shop didn't know what it was doing — that it relied on the insurer's judgment rather than its own professional expertise.
"That's when you start to get into a lot of problems," Eversman said. You don't want to be in court trying to explain "why you're really not incompetent."
Beyond the evidentiary concern, rekeying an insurer's estimate subsidizes bad estimating. If a carrier's adjuster doesn't know what a repair actually costs, reconciling that gap is "the insurance company's problem," Eversman said. Shops that absorb the discrepancy and supplement upward from a flawed starting document are reducing the insurer's incentive to hire qualified adjusters in the first place.
Some shops address this by stamping insurance estimates "for informational purposes only" when they appear in the shop's file. Eversman endorsed that approach.
Supplement Compliance and State Laws
There's also a procedural dimension. Many states have specific laws governing auto repair estimates and supplements. In Ohio, for example, a supplement that exceeds 10 percent of the original estimate requires the shop to secure fresh written authorization from the customer. A shop that starts from an insurer's estimate and generates a large supplement may be creating compliance complexity that didn't need to exist.
The Industry Insurance Institute itself has advised policyholders that "no good adjuster or insurance company will expect you to sign an agreement accepting the insurer's estimate as the total claim payment until you've established, to your own satisfaction, that it will cover the cost of repair." It explicitly encourages customers to get their own estimate and not feel pressured into accepting the carrier's figure.
The message for shops is consistent across sources: write your own estimate, document your own repair plan, and let the insurer reconcile its own accounting with the facts of the repair. The alternative — taking on liability you don't own for work you didn't define — is the path to the litigation that wakes the industry up every few years.