The 5 Secret Tactics to Raising ANY Insurance Offer.

You've been in a car wreck. You've made a claim to the at-fault driver's insurance company and the adjuster calls. Say we're sending you an email with our settlement offer. You think, great, awesome. You get the email. You click the attachments. You open it up, and now you're crestfallen. Your heart drops. It ain't what you thought it was going to be. It's yet another lowball settlement offer by an insurance company. I'm Shane McGuire. I'm a personal injury lawyer here in Texas, and I can't tell you how many times a client has come to me saying some insurance company has given them some lowball settlement offer and how disappointed they are. Well, let me tell you something. I'm going to give you, in this video, five strategies to beat the insurance company's lowball settlement offer. Number one, you need to understand why you got that lowball offer to begin with. Why'd you get it? Well, you got it because you, to the insurance company, you're a problem. You are a risk, and they are trying to eliminate that risk, and you are a problem, believe it or not, as to the insurance company that money can solve, and so they're throwing money at you. Now, what you have when you open that email, looking for that offer, the only thing you've armed yourself with is hope, hope that it would be big, and it turns out that insurance companies are not in the business of giving money away for free, and so what they do is they try to reset your expectations from a fervent hope of a big offer to, well, I guess they know better, and now instead of negotiating the right way, they're throwing 1,500 bucks at you in the hopes that you'll come back at them and say, well, you do two grand, and if you'll do two grand, I'll take it. They're trying to reset your expectations so that you'll counter just within spitting distance of the ridiculous low number that they offered you. Second thing you need to know in order to beat a lowball settlement offer from an insurance company is you need to collect and organize your evidence. Now, listen, not everybody is organized, okay? I don't know if your kids are like my kids. You walk into their room, and it's like a tornado just went off in there. Some people carry that on into adulthood. That may be you. You're going to have to overcome that. You may be the type of person who's super meticulous, and if you are, you're at an advantage in this game because you can assemble all of your evidence and put it in an orderly form and send it to the insurance company. A lot of people, let's be honest, they're kind of aspirationally organized. They kind of think of themselves as organized, kind of like I think of myself as still in shape from high school, but you need to be honest with yourself. Don't lie to yourself. You are who you are. If you're disorganized, try to get it together. If you are organized, channel that. Get all your evidence together. What do I mean by that? Pictures, pictures of the wreck, pictures of property damage, pictures of bruising on your body, cuts you had, the physical evidence of the trauma you endured after this wreck. Two, medical bills, medical records. Get online, pull your medical records, but also get all of the bills. Because listen, when you go to the ER, you don't get one ER bill, do you? Man, you get an ambulance bill. You get a facility fee bill from the hospital. Often, the physicians who work there are contracted. They're not employees of the hospital, so you get a physician fee bill. Then if they did x-rays or a CT scan or an MRI, you get a radiologist bill. You're going to get four bills just from the hospital alone. That's before you went to your primary care doc, before you went to a chiropractor, before you went to physical therapy, before you went to pain management. You're starting off with four bills. You better get them all because you only get one shot at settling your claim because once you sign on the line that is dotted, it's over. Make sure before you negotiate, you have all your evidence together, medical bills, photos, and your lost wages. How much time have you missed from work and what does that cost you? Make sure you assemble all that in a clear form that an insurance adjuster can process and understand. Third strategy for beating that lowball settlement offer, don't accept the lowball settlement offer. The most powerful word in any negotiation is the word no. They offer you $1,500, $2,000, something stupid as your first settlement offer, say no. Hey, let me tell you something. You don't even have to counter. Just say no. I have to tell you something. Where insurance companies are concerned, they're in the money business, right? They collect premium dollars and they hoard it like the dragon with the gold and then they try as hard as they can not to pay those dollars out, but they know that you're wanting money in exchange for a release. You can compensate it for medical bills, lost wages, et cetera. When you just say no and you don't come back with an immediate counter, it throws them off because they're accustomed to people being in a hurry. So if you exhibit patience, you say no to that first offer and you go regroup and wait and collect all your evidence and go back, hey, just say no to that first settlement offer. Don't even counter. Just wait and gather more evidence and that's the best way to make them scared initially. The fourth thing you can do to help beat a lowball settlement offer, and this has to do if you're making a claim on your own insurance as opposed to the at-fault driver's insurance. Just throw around the word bad faith a little bit. Interestingly, the at-fault driver's insurance company does not owe you a duty to negotiate in good faith. I'm going to say it again. The other guy's insurance company doesn't owe you a duty to act in good faith. They owe their own insured a duty to act in good faith, but they don't have a contract with you. They don't owe you a duty. They can say whatever they want to say. They can treat you however they want to treat you. They're just not contractually obligated to treat you right. Your own insurance company does owe you a duty. This comes into play often if you're hit by an uninsured driver and you have underinsured motorist coverage on your vehicle and you contact your own insurance company and they're negotiating with you and they give you some lowball offer under the medical bills. You need to tell them that they're engaged in bad faith settlement practices so your claim can get elevated from that frontline adjuster up to some manager who can put more authority on your claim. The fifth thing you can do to beat a lowball settlement offer, you hire a personal injury lawyer to bring your claim. Listen, this is what we do for a living. We represent clients. We build up the value of their claim and we don't engage in the settlement negotiation with the insurance company until we can get max value for your claim based on the insurance coverage available, the facts of the wreck, the injuries that you've had, the lost wages you have, the medical bills that you have. You've got to wait until the crop is ripe before you reap the harvest. That's true in agriculture and it is true in life and it's true in a personal injury claim. You have to wait for the right moment before you make that demand on the insurance company. Hire a personal injury lawyer and what are we going to do? We know why they made that lowball offer to you. We'll help you organize and collect all the evidence. We know not to accept that stupid first offer that they make and we know how to put the pressure on them to make them understand that we'll come after them for bad faith practices if they continue to engage in the delay tactics and denying your claim. Okay, today you've learned how to beat those lowball settlement offers. First, understand why they're making that lowball. Two, collect and organize all the evidence necessary in order to maximize the value of your claim. Three, just say no baby. Reject that first settlement offer all the time, every time. Four, use a magic word like bad faith if it's your own carrier to get that claim elevated to someone with more authority. And then five, hire a personal injury lawyer in Texas so someone's on your side to make this claim. Doing those five things can ensure that you get thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, in certain circumstances hundreds of thousands of dollars more than you otherwise would if you just followed those five steps when negotiating with an insurance company after a car wreck. And if you want to make sure that you never fall for an insurance company trick, you have to watch my next video. The seven insurance company tactics that can cost you big and how to outsmart them. In that video, I'll break down the sneaky moves adjusters use and exactly how to shut them down. These are the things even experienced Texans get wrong. Just a single mistake can cost you your entire case, so don't miss it.