(1) Insurance adjusters are paid employees of the insurance company. They are skilled at negotiation and are advised by experienced insurance company lawyers who know the law. Together, they know all the strategies to keep you from hiring a lawyer and to get you to settle your claim quickly for as little money as possible. They are not your friend. They are working against you, actively trying to see if they can get you to accept little to no money at all to settle your claim. They may tell you things that are not true, and even pretend that you are not entitled to compensation, to see if you will fall for it. You should not be talking to them.
(2) Insurance companies hope that you do not hire an experienced attorney. Because they know that, if you do, they are almost certainly going to have to pay you more money. They will tell you that you do not need an attorney. And they will lose no sleep at night over the fact that they are a billion-dollar company with an army of lawyers on retainer to protect their rights (and money), but will tell a single mom with no legal training, who has just been in a serious car accident, that she shouldn’t get a lawyer to protect herself. They prey on accident victims who need the money quickly–which, truthfully, is most of us–by making a lowball offer that they hope you will accept without hiring an attorney who will tell you how terrible their offer is. An experienced attorney will know how much your case is worth and will help you get the compensation you deserve. The insurance company has a lawyer to look out for it. You deserve the same protection.
(3) Do not give the insurance adjuster a recorded statement. A common trick of insurance adjusters is to try to get a recorded statement from you that will damage the value of your claim. They may try this when you are still in shock from the accident. They may–in a very friendly way–ask you to guess about facts relating to the accident, when your guesses may hurt you. The bottom line is that they know what they are doing, because they do it all day long. But you don’t. Most people who’ve been in an accident and wind up on the phone with an insurance adjuster have never been through that kind of thing before. And their instinct is to want to be nice and helpful to the adjuster, never believing that the adjuster is trying to trap them into giving damaging answers. Stay off the phone with them. Don’t let them record you.