How to Negotiate with Insurance Adjusters

If you’ve suffered an injury from another driver’s negligence, obtaining fair compensation can be crucial to your overall recovery. In other words, skillfully negotiating your Florida car accident settlement with the car insurance company adjusters is paramount.

A skilled Florida car accident attorney at Eltringham Law Group knows how to negotiate with insurance adjusters. Give us a call or contact us online to discuss your case.

How to Negotiate with the Insurance Adjuster

Being injured by another driver’s negligence puts you in the challenging position of needing compensation for your losses. As such, you may be left to negotiate with the insurance adjuster for fair terms – while they negotiate for as low a settlement as they can manage.

Meanwhile, you’re injured and likely don’t know much about the insurance game. Although you’re at an obvious disadvantage, there are several steps you can take to help fix that.

1. Begin by working closely with a dedicated car accident attorney

When negotiating a car accident settlement, the most important thing you can do is arm yourself with an accomplished car accident attorney. Your attorney will take on all the primary tasks that help guide car accident claims toward advantageous outcomes.

While leaving the negotiating to your attorney is always well advised, it’s still an excellent idea to understand the process and your goals within that process.

2. Know your complete losses

Before you can negotiate a settlement with an insurance claims adjuster, you need to know your complete losses. There is no point in engaging in negotiations if you don’t know how much you need to address every category of loss you experience.

These categories include:

• Property damage to your car and its contents
• Your full range of medical expenses, including ongoing costs & projected future medical expenses
• Your lost earnings, including any decrease in your ability to earn in the future
• Your physical and psychological pain and suffering

Once you establish an overall amount, you’ll be in a much better position to begin negotiations.

3. Come prepared

When it comes to your ability to negotiate with the insurance company, being prepared is key. By making a bullet-pointed list of the losses your settlement needs to address adequately, you’ll be well positioned to stay on task and to ensure that you don’t lose sight of a form of damage that you suffered as a result of the other driver’s negligence.

You can count on the insurance adjuster being both persuasive and skilled at leading claimants off-topic, which makes your prep work that much more important.

4. Write down your questions

If the insurance company’s numbers do not align with your own, you need to enquire why that is. You may have many questions about the insurance company’s early settlement offer, and you should write them all down.

Not only does asking questions allow you more insight into the insurance company’s position, but it can also afford you leverage regarding negotiations. Just as the insurance company is hoping you’ll give up something that harms your claim when they question you, you have the same opportunity and should not waste it.

5. Isolate the sticking points

Knowing how to negotiate with an insurance adjuster boils down to having a strategy and sticking to it. Your claim is complicated and contains many moving parts, so there is likely no way to resolve every concern in one go – you’ll almost certainly have to break it down into manageable chunks.

Perhaps, there are several points that have been resolved to your satisfaction, but others have become sticking points. Instead of allowing the obstacles to get swept away with the rest of your claim, it’s important to isolate them and address them directly.

By employing this tactic, you help ensure that these sticking points don’t get lost in the shuffle – even if you have to return to them later.

6. Know when to walk away

Negotiations are all about moving toward a final settlement, but there are instances when calling it quits and moving forward by filing a lawsuit against the insurance company is the best option.

Doing so is not a sign of failure but, instead, is a sign that you know when to say enough is enough.

If the insurance company is engaging in any of the following tactics, your attorney is very likely to advise you to put the kibosh on negotiations:

• Engaging in bad-faith practices generally
• Sticking to lowball offers only
• Artificially prolonging or complicating the claims process
• Denying the extent of your losses
• Denying their policyholder’s fault in the matter or elevating the degree to which you share responsibility

The insurance company may be motivated to dig deeper regarding negotiations in response to your filing. If not, you can resolve the matter in accordance with the law in the courtroom.

Let a Boca Raton Car Accident Attorney Help Negotiate

The impressive Boca Raton car accident attorneys at Eltringham Law Group take great pride in their proven ability to guide challenging car accident claims toward optimal outcomes that honor our client’s rights and best interests.

If you’ve suffered an injury from another driver’s negligence, obtaining fair compensation is key, and our legal team has the skills to successfully negotiate a settlement that works for you. For more information about how we can help, call us at 561-944-6746 or contact us online today.

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