It is crucial that you maintain a cordial relationship with the claims representative from the negligent party’s insurance company when dealing with them regarding your bodily injury claim. You should never consider them an adversary or enemy. To the contrary, they can help you if you only help them.
Claims Department Hierarchy
In order to properly navigate the industry on adjusting claims for bodily injury and other insurance claims, you should understand how the industry works. The claims representative handling your claim has to report what he or she knows to a supervisor, who has to report to a supervisor, all the way up the chain. Once a claim initially comes in, the claims department will assign it to one of approximately five categories: First call settlements, soft tissue cases, special or complex cases, clear limits case, and claims assessment case. If a case gets categorized as a claims assessment case, the insurance company will use some sort of computer program (like Colossus) to evaluate the case.
Claims Assessment Cases
In claims assessment cases, the program used by the insurance company will require the adjustor to add information about the claim into boxes. It is important to note that actual medical records and reports will be the only sources that the claims representative will use to put into the program. If you want the insurance adjustor to help you, you should feed as much information regarding your bodily injury claim and the resulting impact it has on your life, so that they can input each item into their system.
Help the Adjustor Help You
The goal is to have them go back to their supervisor in order to adjust the claim upwards. The last thing you want to do, after the claim has been sitting there for months with a low authority, is to tell them you are demanding $250,000 based on all these medical charges and bills they haven’t seen. You want to arm the claims representative with enough information to help them help you by having supporting documentation for a $250,000 demand. They should expect a figure like that to be coming to them, with documentation to support it. Next week, we will discuss the insurance company’s reserve and how to deal with that figure.
For these reasons, it is imperative to hire a veteran litigator and experienced car accident lawyer Little Rock, AR trusts who has been involved in the settlement of claims for years.