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A car accident in Michigan, from the scene to the settlement. Every step of the claim, in order.
Most people go through this once, without a map. The numbers below are the official count, not our estimate. The rest of this guide is the map.
Source: Michigan State Police, Michigan Traffic Crash Facts, 2024 annual data.
Each phase protects the one after it. Get medical care fast, open the claim on time, build the record, then settle from strength.
Move out of traffic, check on everyone, and call 911 when anyone is hurt. Then photograph both cars from multiple angles, the wider scene including signals and skid marks, the other driver's license and insurance card, and names and numbers for every witness. Your phone is the best investigator that will ever be at your crash. Use it before anything moves.
What not to say. Do not apologize or speculate about fault, at the scene or after. Talk to your own insurer honestly and briefly. Give the other driver's insurer nothing recorded, ever, without counsel.
Adrenaline masks injuries, and soft-tissue damage and concussions surface days later. A gap between crash and treatment becomes the insurer's favorite argument that the crash did not hurt you. Close the gap before it exists, and tell the doctor it was a car crash so the record ties injury to accident.
Reporting to your insurer. Michigan no-fault requires prompt notice, and the written application for benefits starts your PIP clock. File it honestly, minimally, and on time. Mistakes on this form follow the claim.
Treat consistently and keep every appointment. Start the logs that pay later: wage loss documentation, attendant care hours, replacement services, and mileage. Route adjuster contact through one channel and keep it brief.
Serious injuries may cross Michigan's threshold for pain and suffering, which opens the claim against the at-fault driver. Too early undervalues injuries still developing. Too late collides with deadlines. This is the phase where a lawyer changes the math most. If yours is a case where it does not, we say so and tell you what to do instead.
Most cases settle. Straightforward claims take months to resolve, suits take longer, and filing suit is usually one more stage of the negotiation. Trials are rare. You approve any settlement.
Every injury claim in Michigan runs on clocks that start the day you are hurt. The forms are simple and the deadlines are unforgiving.
Time from the crash to each cutoff. Every case has facts that can shift these, which is exactly what a free first look confirms.
No formula survives contact with a real case, but the drivers are knowable. Economic damages are receipts and math. Pain and suffering is argued, not calculated, and multiplier rules of thumb are internet folklore.
Reported contributing factors, statewide. The other driver's behavior is often the heart of the fault argument.
Source: Michigan State Police 2024 year-end crash data.
For a property-only fender-bender with a cooperative insurer, probably not, and we will say so. For injuries, denied benefits, threshold questions, or any insurer behaving like it has somewhere better to be, yes, and earlier is cheaper than later. The consultation is free either way.
Yes, when your injuries cross Michigan's threshold for pain and suffering. No-fault pays your medical care and wage loss regardless of fault. The suit against the at-fault driver is the second claim, and it carries the pain and suffering recovery.
Almost never before your treatment stabilizes, because you cannot price an injury that is still unfolding. Early offers exist because they are cheap. A counter with documentation behind it is the process working.
Fault is built from the police report, scene photos, witness accounts, and vehicle damage, then argued between insurers under Michigan's comparative fault rules. Your no-fault benefits do not depend on fault. The claim against the other driver does, which is why week-one evidence matters.
Ask. The first look is free, and small injury claims often carry PIP benefits that go unclaimed. If a lawyer will not improve your outcome after fees, the honest answer is to tell you that, with directions for handling it yourself.
Two Michigan Supreme Court decisions in 2025 changed who can sue for no-fault benefits and how far the 2019 reform reaches back. Seven rulings in all, newest first, with what each one means for a Michigan car accident claim now. We update this section when a new decision lands.
July 28, 2026
The Michigan Supreme Court decided two no-fault cases in 2025. One changed who is allowed to sue after signing an assignment at a clinic. The other set how far the 2019 reform reaches back. Rulings like these decide whether medical bills get paid and how long you have to ask. Here is what each court held, newest first.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided July 3, 2025, Docket Nos. 165537, 165538, and 165964
Two plaintiffs sued for no-fault benefits after the right to collect them had already moved to someone else. C-Spine is a medical provider. It took assignments from its patients, then assigned those receivables to factoring companies. Wallace is a patient who assigned her benefits to the providers treating her. Both filed suit anyway. The insurers argued the cases were dead on arrival, because neither plaintiff still held the claim.
The Court split that into two questions. Standing and real party in interest are not the same thing. Both plaintiffs had standing under MCL 500.3112, because the statute gave them a cause of action. Neither was the real party in interest on the day of filing, because the assignment had moved the claim to someone else. That gap did not kill the case. The Court held that a defect in real party in interest status can be cured after a lawsuit is filed, through a formal step inside the litigation such as amending the complaint. Handling it quietly outside of court does not count.
The Court also pulled the one-year-back rule out of that analysis. It limits what a person can recover. It does not decide who is allowed to sue.
If you signed an assignment at a clinic and later heard your file had a problem, C-Spine is the decision to read. The Court treated that defect as curable, not fatal.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided April 1, 2025, Docket No. 165445
The 2019 reform added a tolling provision to MCL 500.3145. Tolling pauses the clock while an insurer sits on a claim it has not paid. The fight here was over reach. Does that new pause apply to bills incurred before the reform arrived?
The Court held that MCL 500.3145(3) does not apply retroactively to causes of action that began to accrue before that provision took effect on June 11, 2019. A no-fault claim accrues when the expense is incurred. The law in force on that date governs it, not the law in force when someone finally files.
The opinion also traced how Michigan got here. Courts recognized judicial tolling of the one-year period for roughly two decades until Devillers v Auto Club Insurance Association ended it in 2005. The Legislature brought tolling back in writing in 2019. Written tolling starts when the Legislature said it starts.
Delay costs money in a no-fault claim. Under Spine Specialists, the version of MCL 500.3145 in force when the expense was incurred is the version that governs.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided July 31, 2023, Docket No. 164772
Ellen Andary was catastrophically injured in 2014. Philip Krueger was injured in 1990. Both were living on lifetime no-fault benefits when the 2019 reform rewrote MCL 500.3157. The new version caps what providers can charge under a medical fee schedule and limits family-provided attendant care to a set number of hours per week. Their insurers moved to apply the caps to them.
The Court said no. The policies bound the insurers to provide benefits under the law that existed at the time of injury, and the 2019 amendments did not clearly convey an intent to retroactively modify those vested contractual rights. Neither the fee schedule limits nor the family attendant care hour caps reduce benefits for people whose rights vested before the amendments took effect.
Andary drew the line at vesting. Rights that vested before the amendments took effect on June 11, 2019 keep the older measure. For injuries after that date, the Court left the fee schedule and the attendant care cap in place.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided May 25, 2017, Docket No. 152758
Covenant treated a man hurt in a crash and billed State Farm more than forty three thousand dollars. State Farm denied it. Meanwhile, without telling the hospital, the patient settled his own case and released the insurer. Covenant sued anyway.
The Court held that nothing in the no-fault act gives a healthcare provider a statutory right to sue an insurer directly for personal protection insurance benefits. Only two sections mention providers at all, and neither creates that right. The Court pointed at the word "incurred" in MCL 500.3107(1)(a). Patients incur charges and become liable for them. Providers do not.
That decision is why assignment paperwork now sits in front of you at almost every clinic in Michigan. It also explains why a settlement a patient signs can land on a hospital that never heard about it.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided July 30, 2012, 492 Mich 169; 821 NW2d 520
A car struck a pedestrian. She needed help with ordinary household tasks she could no longer do herself. No-fault calls that replacement services. Her PIP coverage paid a limited amount for a limited time. She went after the at-fault driver for the rest.
The Court held that replacement services are not recoverable in a third-party negligence case. MCL 500.3135(3)(c) lists three categories of excess economic damages, and only three: allowable expenses, work loss, and survivor's loss. Replacement services is not on that list. The Court treated allowable expenses and replacement services as separate and distinct categories rather than one folded inside the other.
Johnson keeps household help on the PIP side of the case. The Court held the third-party claim does not reach it.
Michigan Court of Appeals, decided December 1, 2011, 294 Mich App 651
Families do the hardest work after a serious crash. A mother learns to move a son who cannot move himself. A wife handles medication schedules at two in the morning. Michigan no-fault pays for that care. The question in this case was how much.
The Court held that the market rate charged by professional attendant care agencies is relevant to setting a rate for family-provided services, and that evidence of agency rates is a material and probative measure of what that care is generally worth. Agency rates do not automatically decide the number. They are one measure a jury may weigh, alongside others, because the statute makes reasonableness the operative test.
Insurers frequently push family caregivers toward a low hourly wage figure. This decision is why that argument does not end the conversation.
Michigan Supreme Court, decided July 31, 2010, 487 Mich 180; 795 NW2d 517
A man's ankle was crushed when a coworker backed a truck over it. He missed work, lost his season of golf, and could not do what he used to do. Under the standard then in force, that was not enough to sue the driver who hurt him.
The Court overruled Kreiner v Fischer and rebuilt the threshold. A serious impairment of body function has three parts. An objectively manifested impairment, of an important body function, that affects the person's general ability to lead his or her normal life. The Court held that the impairment does not have to be permanent, and it does not have to touch a person's entire life. Only that some of the person's ability to live in his or her normal manner of living has been affected.
This is still the test every Michigan pain and suffering claim has to meet.
Case law moves. What you can recover depends on your injury date, your policy, and what a court decided most recently. If something here sounds like your situation, call 844-ASK-AZZO, which is 844-275-2996. Our intake team takes your information, gathers the basics of the crash, and routes your question to the right person at the firm. No pressure, and no charge for the question.
Lauren Sitto Azzo, lead attorney at Azzo Law, PLLC, is responsible for the content of this page. This section is general information about Michigan court decisions and not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
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