If you have been injured in a Louisville car accident it is important to know that insurance adjuster tactics are designed to reduce your claim or eliminate it. Insurance adjusters have one job responsibility: get you to accept the lowest possible payment for your personal injury claim. There are three typical tactics they will employ to get you to unwittingly reduce the amount of value of your case.
Asking you very general and vague sounding questions like “How are you feeling?” or “Can you summarize the accident in your own words?” These questions are actually loaded questions designed to encourage you to give responses which weaken your case. Most people will answer “How are you feeling?” with “I’m ok, but…” The insurance adjuster will use any minimization of your injuries in order to reduce the amount they have to pay.
Insurance adjuster tactics are designed to reduce your claim and often involve questionable strategies. For example, you are not required to sign any statement or fill out any forms in the immediate aftermath of the accident. Insurance adjusters often attempt to contact you quickly after the accident and will make a claim such as “I need to get a quick statement from you before I can process your claim.” This is simply untrue. This tactic is designed to get you to provide information which can and will be used against your own interests to reduce or deny your claim.
“You weren’t hurt that badly, your medical bills aren’t even that high.” Many serious injuries which cause you to miss work and which simply make life miserable may not result in high medical bills. For example, broken ribs are quite painful and may disable you for weeks. The medical bills for broken ribs may only be a few thousand dollars. The adjuster will try to say something like “Your medical bills were only $8,000 so, I’ll tell you what, I shouldn’t do this but I’ll ad 50 percent more for having to endure the pain.” That $12,000 offer is an attempt to settle a case which might be actually worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This is why it is important to do two things if you have been injured in a motor vehicle accident:
Get a thorough medical examination within 24 to 48 hours
Call the experienced personal injury attorneys at HLH for a free consultation at (866) 583-9701 or contact us to ask us your questions.