How to Answer Questions from an Insurance Company After a Car Accident

How do you answer questions from the insurance company after a car wreck?

If you were injured, it’s likely the insurance adjuster will attempt to contact you soon after the car crash – they will try to get through to you before you have a chance to talk with an attorney about your case…

In fact, plaintiff’s attorneys are prohibited by Rule 7.3(b)(3) from contacting you for 30 days after an accident, while insurance adjusters are free to immediately get in touch with you, giving the insurance companies the opportunity to shut your case down by getting you to make damaging statements or by settling your case for “nuisance value” before you know what the case is worth and what your rights are…

Below, we will discuss why you should not answer questions from an insurance company after a car accident, including:

• How answering questions from an insurance adjuster can hurt your case,
• The types of questions insurance agents will attempt to ask you, and
• What you should do when the insurance company calls you after an auto accident.

Guidelines for Answering Questions from an Insurance Company After a Car Wreck

Here are some helpful guidelines for answering questions from an insurance company after your auto accident:

1. Do not answer questions from the insurance company.
2. Get their name and contact information.
3. Refer them to your car accident attorney.

How to Answer Insurance Questions After a Car Accident

Just now, I googled “how to answer insurance questions after a car accident,” and the results I found included attorney websites telling potential clients how to answer questions from insurance agents.

No, no, no!

This is the worst advice an attorney could give to someone who was just involved in a car wreck.

Why?

A car wreck attorney advising his or her clients to just take the adjuster’s call and answer the insurance company’s questions is as competent as a criminal defense lawyer advising his or her clients to just go down to the police department and answer the detective’s questions…

Insurance adjusters are trained to get people to make admissions that will hurt their case and help the insurance company’s case, just as police detectives are trained to get admissions that can be used as evidence of guilt.

1) When plaintiffs voluntarily submit to questioning by insurance agents without their attorneys, their claims are more likely to be denied or substantially reduced, just as 2) when suspects in a criminal case voluntarily submit to questioning by police detectives without their attorneys, innocent people go to jail.

Inform your insurance company of the fact that the wreck happened, but do not answer questions from the other driver’s insurance company.

How Answering Questions from an Insurance Company Can Hurt Your Case

What could it hurt?

The insurance adjuster knows what they need to establish to avoid liability, create questions as to liability, or minimize your damages (and their ultimate payout). You don’t. They do this every day of the week. You don’t.

Some of the tricks insurance companies will use to limit their liability or damages include:

• Getting you to make inconsistent statements – if your answers are slightly different on the scene, to the officer, to the insurance agent on the phone, and in your deposition, that’s not necessarily an accident – you bet the insurance company is going to say that the inconsistencies show that you are a liar or that you are prone to exaggerate the facts.
• Trick questions – do you know the exact meanings and legal definitions of all the words the adjuster is using? They do. And they are asking you questions that are carefully worded to avoid liability or damages in your case.
• Locking you into descriptions of your injuries that minimize the extent of your damages or of your need for long-term care – if you say something different later, you must be lying or exaggerating your injuries.
• Cross-examination ammunition – every question you answer, whether it is audio recorded or not, will provide material for the insurance company’s defense attorneys to use against you during cross-examinations at your deposition or trial.
• Liability terminology – what did you see, what were you thinking at the time, what was the passenger doing, was there an intervening cause of the crash, were there skid marks on the road, what color was the light, at what point did you hit the brakes, did you see their brake lights before the crash, were there animals or pedestrians in the road, how long did you stop at the stop sign before continuing through the intersection, there are a thousand different ways to create a question regarding liability in a car crash. Are you familiar with them all?

The insurance company’s only goal is to maximize profits – they are a for-profit company that is part of a trillion-dollar-per-year industry.

This means that the insurance company’s only job is to not pay you.

This means that the insurance company’s only goal in interviewing you is to find a way to not pay you.

Therefore, it will not help your case to talk to an insurance agent after a car wreck. Refer them to your attorney.

Got Axelrod?

If you have been hurt in a car accident, the other driver’s insurance company will most likely contact you soon after to attempt to get a recorded statement from you – don’t do it. Consult with an experienced auto accident attorney before talking to the insurance company.

Call your SC auto accident lawyer on the Axelrod team now at 843-258-4079 or send us a message for a free case evaluation.