Every year, lawyers meet with motorcyclists, or their grieving loved ones to talk about the client's horrendous injuries or a death in a motorcycle crash. The story we hear over and over is "I (or my wife/husband/daughter/son) was driving down the road, it was a nice clear day, and all of a sudden, a car turned right in front of me (him/her) and I couldn't stop. The driver just didn't see me!" Most lawyers advise the client to make a claim for the offending driver's insurance policy and close the file. While that course of action may be appropriate when the harm is minimal and the insurance coverage is sufficient, it does not begin to address appropriate compensation when the client is catastrophically injured or a client's loved one has died. In many instances, the actual cause of this type of crash was a decision made by a motorcycle manufacturer who chose not to pay attention to history and built the vehicle without adequate lighting conspicuity.

In 1989, a published study titled "Motorcycle Conspicuity: An Evaluation and Synthesis of Influential Factors, Journal of Safety Research," Vol. 20, pp. 153-176, recounted that motorcycles were overrepresented in the U.S. fatal motor vehicle accident data. The authors reported that most of these crashes occur during daytime hours and because motorists "do not see" the on- coming motorcycle. This phenomenon led some states and then the federal government to require all motorcycles to be built with an auto-low beam headlight feature. Yet, 20 years later, the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency (NHTSA) reported that the annual number of motorcycle fatalities had doubled! See NHTSA Report DOT HS 811 507. And, a decade later, in 2021 the National Institutes of Health published a paper recounting that road users' detection of motorcycles/motorcyclists remains a serious safety problem.