You get in a car accident, slip in a store or sustain a chronic injury over the course of your career. What comes next? Well, you try to heal, and you try to get the support you need from the parties responsible for your injury.
Injuries happen every day. They are the sole focus of many careers. You have doctors, hospital staff, personal injury attorneys and more — and then you have insurance adjusters.
What do insurance adjusters do?
As per FindLaw, insurance adjusters are skillful negotiators that work mainly to assess the true value of insurance claims. Of course, they are also career professionals whose interests align with large corporations. These corporations are often your main adversaries in personal injury lawsuits.
There are some overlapping interests between you and the insurance company. For example, you both probably want the claim to end as soon as possible.
For you, you would want a quick resolution to get your money — you need to pay bills and access medical care. For the company, a quick resolution is good because it usually means that the issue is over and they do not have to worry about you fighting for what you truly deserve.
How do you negotiate with insurance companies?
Knowing this, you can probably presume that it will not be easy to negotiate with insurance adjusters. Furthermore, they are likely to try to make you feel like you are getting a relatively good deal.
It is often important to prepare fully for these types of conversations. It is also a good idea, in most cases, to understand that, while you are not enemies, the insurance company has no reason to act completely in your best interests. Instead, it is likely that adjusters will act completely in the best interests of their companies and their respective shareholders, emphasizing the areas in which those goals overlap with yours.
Knowing whom to trust in this type of situation can be difficult. If you trust no-one and nothing else, you might want to trust your own instinct. If it seems like something is wrong with the offer an adjuster presents you, that might very well be the case.