Many personal injury law firms advertise using negative inferences about the insurance business. The question posed for this article was: "What would be an ethical method for the insurance business to respond to these advertisements or other attacks on the honesty and integrity of the insurance business?"

Responses came from a broad cross section of people and were about evenly split between "respond by showing the positive aspects of insurance" and "ignore the ads, do claims work properly and educate insureds." There was a distinct minority who suggested the insurance business counterattack.

Examples of the "accentuate the positives" approach include an Arizona underwriter who wrote: "We understand how hard our claim departments work to make fair, objective decisions on all claims. These folks are our true measure of our success. Without insurance, many of our daily activities could not take place. An ethical response is to use the media to tell all the wonderful things we do such as [putting] a [catastrophe] team on site within 24 hours" of an event. "We need to show John Q. Public we are not the bad guys."