If you get injured in a car accident, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of needing compensation from a billion-dollar insurance company. While it’s nice to know that the party responsible for paying for your losses has the resources to do so, getting them to do it is a much different story. Most insurance companies employ numerous strategies to make recovering compensation nearly impossible.
How do you find success in this David vs. Goliath situation? First, it’s important to understand how an insurance company thinks. Unlike people, insurance companies have no feelings, they don’t feel sympathy, frustration, or anger, they can’t be intimidated, and they never get scared. The only thing that an insurance company cares about is its bottom line. To an insurance company, your injury is nothing more than numbers on a spreadsheet to be dealt with in the most cost-effective way.
Understanding this mentality holds the key to successfully pursuing a claim against an insurance company. An insurance company’s weakness comes from its obsession with its bottom line. In an attempt to keep expenses low, an insurance company will always try to cut corners. They hire inexperienced adjusters to deal with claims, they also hire inexpensive lawyers to defend lawsuits. Insurance company adjusters and lawyers are always overworked and underpaid, they almost never have a strong affinity to their employer.
An experienced lawyer will understand this dynamic and use it to their advantage. I understand an insurance company adjuster may have 150 to 200 files to deal with. Often, they won’t know the name of most of the people whose claims they are handling. It’s my job to make my client’s file stand out in such a way that the adjuster wants to resolve the claim. The way to do this is through hard work. I make sure that I’m constantly calling to discuss the case and sending letters with my client’s claim information such as witness statements and medical records.
Often, an overworked adjuster will ask for extra time to evaluate a claim, I rarely agree to such a request. If an adjuster doesn’t evaluate a claim within a specific time period that I’ve set, I will start a lawsuit. Once a lawsuit has been started it will often be assigned to an overworked and underpaid insurance company lawyer. The same rules that apply to litigating a case also applies to pursuing an insurance claim, I always try and outwork the defense lawyer.
Eventually, this strategy yields results. An adjuster or defense attorney will always seek to resolve a claim against an attorney that is making them work as opposed to an attorney that is barely bothering them.