If you have been injured, you may wish to file a claim against the responsible party. After the at-fault party’s insurance company receives the claim, they assign an adjuster to the case. It is this person’s job to determine how the accident occurred and make a suggestion as to how much money the insurance company should offer you. The main thing to understand here is that the insurance adjuster is not working for you.
In reality, the insurance adjuster’s job is to ensure that the insurance company pays you as little as possible. This is why you need a personal injury lawyer when you decide to hold the at-fault party responsible for your injuries.
The insurance adjuster will use software and their years of experience to settle on an amount to offer you for your injuries. That’s why the first offer you hear will be very low. In most cases, people who have been injured have medical bills piling up, and they may have been unable to work while they are recovering. This makes the offer sound very appealing, but it is not a good idea for you to take these low initial offers.
The first offer you receive is never enough to cover all of your medical bills and property repair bills. It certainly will not be enough to support your family while you are out of work. If you accept the offer out of desperation, you will not be able to return to the same insurance company to receive additional compensation later when you run out of money.
The first offer you will likely receive will only be between $1,000 and $3,000. The insurance company sees these claims as “nuisance claims” and wants to be finished with them as quickly as possible. In most cases, you receive these offers before you know whether or not you will need long-term medical care. The insurance company wants you to take these offers before you have a chance to hire a lawyer. Do not fall for this trick.
Insurance adjusters contact you early and express concern for you. That is what they want you to think, but that is not what is really going on. They may ask you to record your statement, but you must decline. The adjuster knows what to ask you to make you inadvertently say something self-incriminating. Rather than do this, tell them that your attorney will be in touch with them.
The first thing that an insurance adjuster will do is investigate the incident. The police wrote a report; you may have taken pictures at the scene; the hospital staff created medical reports; and the witnesses gave their statements. The insurance adjuster will go over all of these documents.
Another thing that insurance adjusters do is look into your past history. They are hoping to find evidence of injuries you had in the past that could explain away the injuries that you sustained in the current accident. This gives them a reason to deny that their client caused your injury. In addition to that, they will look up your social media accounts. If they find pictures of you surfing at the beach, they will use this as evidence to say that you are not as injured as you claim to be.
Insurance adjusters use formulas to determine the amounts they offer you. These sums will cover economic and non-economic damages.
Economic damages are rather easy to determine. Damages that fall under this category have a clear monetary value, and they include the following:
• All medical bills
• Lost wages
• Property damages
• Future medical expenses
Non-economic damages are much harder to quantify, and they include the following:
• Pain and Suffering: This is the pain and discomfort that your injury has been causing you since the day you were injured.
• Emotional Distress: Your injury may have led to PTSD, insomnia, fear, depression or anxiety, along with other psychological issues.
• Loss of Enjoyment of Life: Loss of enjoyment of life compensates you monetarily for your inability to engage in the recreational activities or hobbies you enjoyed before the accident took place.
• Physical Impairment or Disfigurement: Physical impairment or disfigurement compensates you for paralysis, scarring and physical alterations that occurred as a result of the accident.
• Loss of consortium: This is a claim that your family members can make. It compensates them for the loss of intimacy due to your injuries, loss of support and loss of companionship.
In most cases, the insurance adjuster will use a computer program to determine the amount of money they will offer you. The adjuster enters information they have about your accident, such as your medical records, and the program determines the settlement range. If your injury receives a high “severity code,” the software will recommend a higher settlement amount.
Unfortunately, the insurance adjusters will enter the information into the software. As we have seen, they are unlikely to do this in a way that benefits you. From the beginning, they can set the software to recommend a settlement amount that is between 12% and 20% lower than it would be without this manipulation.
The software also aids insurance adjusters in their job of offering you the least amount of money by considering factors that are not related to the claim. These factors include the following:
• Where you are located and what the local juries have decided in the past
• Whether or not you continued to work after you were injured
• If there are any gaps in your medical treatment
• Do you have an attorney, and does this attorney ever take these cases to trial?
From the last factor alone, you can see that having a tireless personal injury lawyer who is familiar insurance companies’ bad faith tactics is very important to obtaining a fair settlement for your injuries.
Supriyo Khan
Supriyo Khan
Supriyo Khan
Supriyo Khan
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