How Do I Settle a Car Accident Claim Without a Lawyer?

People who have suffered injuries in a car accident sometimes wonder if they can do without a lawyer, and instead settle the injury claim on their own. It’s an understandable instinct. If you can get as much money yourself as a lawyer could get for you, then why bother with hiring a lawyer, right?

But here’s the thing: you can’t. In fact, trying to “represent yourself” in a car accident claim is almost always a terrible, costly mistake that leaves you with far less money than you deserve, or worse, with no money at all.

The vast majority of people who secure compensation after a car accident have the help of an attorney, and for good reason. Car accident lawyers help their clients build strong cases for maximum damages that hold up in insurance negotiations and court.

If you want to settle a car accident claim for the amount of money you deserve, you should work with an experienced car accident injury lawyer.

Here’s why.

What a Car Accident Lawyer Can Do That You Probably Can’t

Car accident injury lawyers are trained professionals. They’ve spent years in school and law practice honing their knowledge, skills, and instincts for building, proving, and settling car accident injury cases. They know how to achieve favorable financial outcomes for car accident victims. It’s what they do, day-in, day-out.

Talk with insurance adjusters without putting your claim at risk.

Communicating with insurance companies is notoriously difficult and stressful in the best of situations, much less when you’re the injured victim of an auto accident. Insurance adjusters handling a car accident injury claim, whether they represent your auto insurer or the at-fault party’s, try every which way to find reasons not to pay you the money you deserve. Talking to them and answering their (carefully worded, tricky) questions directly is just asking for trouble.

Car accident lawyers, in contrast, know how to talk to car insurance companies on your behalf. Lawyers speak the adjusters’ language. They understand the motivations, pressure points, and priorities of insurance adjusters and their employers. They have an instinct for when a case is ripe for settlement, and when they should continue piling on the pressure and collecting the evidence to prove your claim.

Plus, lawyers are not you. Unlike you, they can talk with an adjuster about what happened without putting a claim at risk. They’re a buffer that helps to shield you from making the sort of costly mistakes and stray comments that insurance adjusters lie in wait to pounce on as a reason to deny your claim.

Obtain, organize, and make the most of evidence.

Car accident claims are built on a foundation of evidence, including witness statements, electronic data, photos, videos, documents, and expert opinions. Without evidence, there is no case, and with no case, there’s no settlement.

Skilled car accident lawyers know where to find valuable evidence, how to get their hands on it, and the best ways to use it to your advantage. They understand the rules of procedure involved in demanding information from at-fault parties through the process of pre-trial discovery. They have practiced over years the skill of interviewing witnesses and obtaining critical testimony through depositions. They work with a network of experts who can provide valuable analysis of how an accident happened, who’s to blame, and how much you should receive in compensation.

Few, if any accident victims possess that kind of skill and know-how. Even if they did, accident victims also rarely (if ever) have the time, energy, and bandwidth to undertake the tasks involved in collecting, organizing, and deploying evidence to maximum advantage.

As above, lawyers always do this job better simply because they’re not you, and do not have to contend with the challenges, discomfort, and strain that you currently face.

Evaluate and explain your rights and options.

To achieve the goal of a car accident claim—payment of the maximum amount of money possible—you need to know your rights and how to put them to work for you. Oftentimes, the law offers multiple potential options or strategies for achieving your desired result. A skilled lawyer knows the pros and cons of each of them, and can suggest a path forward tailored to your needs and priorities and the strengths and weaknesses of your case.

An experienced lawyer can also explain those options to you in plain English so that you understand exactly what’s at stake and the factors to weigh in making decisions about how to proceed.

That’s the kind of knowledge and instinct that you can only get from handling car accident cases for years. Lawyers draw on past cases to help them shape the advice they give in future ones.

You cannot hope to make sound, informed choices about the direction of your case without that base of knowledge.

Get taken seriously.

Lawyers have a saying: “The man who represents himself has a fool for a client.” And, to be blunt, that’s exactly how lawyers, insurance adjusters, judges, court administrators, and any other professional involved in your car accident claim will see you.

Simply put, no one in the legal or insurance industry takes people who represent themselves in a car accident claim seriously. They assume, instead, that anyone representing himself either couldn’t find a competent lawyer willing to take his case (i.e., that the case is a loser) or that he simply has no idea what he’s doing.

Either way, the claim will be treated as unserious at best, and a total joke at worst, which means it will have minimal settlement value and a near-zero chance of succeeding in a courtroom.

In other words, once again, the benefit of having a skilled car accident lawyer represent you is that it’s the only way anyone will treat your claim with the seriousness it truly deserves.

Here’s What Happens When People Insist on Representing Themselves

We’d hope that you already agree, having read this far, that going without a lawyer in your car accident claim is a terrible idea.

In case you still harbor doubts, however, here are just a few of the disastrous mistakes people commonly make when they try to represent themselves. It’s not pretty, so don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Sinking the claim by giving a recorded statement to an insurance adjuster.

Insurance adjusters love nothing more than to get an accident victim on tape talking about the crash and the injuries it caused. A recorded statement is solid-gold evidence. If an adjuster can get the victim to say something on a recording that calls the claim or its value into doubt, that’s the ballgame.

Knowing that accident victims rarely know any better, insurance adjusters commonly press for a recorded statement if victims are willing to talk to them. Then, the adjusters walk the victims through a series of carefully worded questions designed to elicit statements that undermine the victim’s claim. More often than not, the adjusters get what they want on tape, and the claim loses most, if not all, of its value.

Asking for too little, and getting even less.

Unless you are a car accident lawyer or insurance adjuster, chances are you have no idea how to calculate the damages the law entitles you to receive for your injuries. You might succeed in tallying up your past expenses, sure. But what about predicting future costs and discounting them back to present value? Or assessing the appropriate amount of pain and suffering damages? Or calculating your lost earning potential? Or putting a value on living with a disfiguring scar, or a disability?

Most of the time, car accident victims badly underestimate the damages they have a right to demand in an injury claim. By asking for less than they have a right to receive, they send a clear signal to insurance companies and defense lawyers that they are in-over-their-heads. Then, during negotiations, that amount shrinks further. By the time they’re done, victims who represent themselves stand a good chance of having agreed to settle their claim for a small fraction of what a lawyer could have gotten for them, simply by having started at a number that was far too low.

Not knowing who owes damages.

Choosing the right party or parties to pursue for compensation constitutes an important part of every car accident injury claim. Crash victims who try to represent themselves often shoot themselves in the foot by failing to demand compensation from parties who owe it, or by not understanding how the legal and financial relationships between parties can affect who-pays-what.

Take, for example, a scenario in which a commercial driver causes an accident that leaves the victim injured. The victim demands damages from the driver’s employer, only to have the employer deny liability on the basis that the driver works as an independent contractor.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter. A skilled car accident lawyer would know how to analyze and respond to the employer’s argument. Lacking knowledge of the law and experience in car accident disputes, however, an injured victim might simply give up on suing the employer altogether, letting a potentially well-funded party off the hook.

Death by a thousand procedural errors.

Courts, opposing lawyers, and insurance companies have limited patience for people who do not know their way around car accident claims. They might initially cut a victim who represents themselves some slack, but eventually, they will let them make mistakes and hold them to the (increasingly dire) consequences.

People who represent themselves frequently kill their own claims, slowly but surely, by missing deadlines, failing to file necessary documents, misunderstanding rules of evidence, asking the court to do things it has no power to do, and not asking the court to make decisions necessary to move a case forward.

Skilled car accident lawyers, needless to say, do not make those kinds of fatal mistakes.

Things You Can Do to Improve the Odds of Settling of Your Car Accident Claim

We’ve spent the bulk of this blog post dismantling the notion of representing yourself in a car accident injury claim. If we seem insistent, it’s only because we’ve seen people who deserve significant financial compensation for crash injuries end up with nothing, or almost nothing, by trying to act as their own lawyers.

Still, we do not want to leave you with the impression that there’s nothing you can do to help your car accident claim get settled. Here are some simple steps you can take to make the most of your rights to compensation for your car accident injuries.

Seek Medical Care and Do What Your Doctor Says

Go to the doctor after any car accident in which you might have suffered injuries, even if you feel okay. Your health takes priority, and many common car accident injuries do not necessarily exhibit symptoms immediately. Within 24 hours of any crash (and sooner if you need emergency care), have a doctor check you over and then follow the doctor’s orders.

Beyond protecting your health, seeking care, and doing what the doctor tells you improves your chances of a settlement. It creates medical records that a lawyer can use to prove the existence, type, and severity of your injuries. It also demonstrates that you did what you could to take care of yourself, foreclosing the possibility of defense lawyers and insurance companies arguing that you, rather than their client, should take the blame for your injuries.

Throw Nothing Away

Keep everything associated with your car accident so that a lawyer can review it. Hold on to documents like medical records, receipts for medication, and insurance statements. Save the clothes you were wearing when you crashed. Do not get vehicle damage fixed until it has been thoroughly documented with photos or video, and inspected by a professional.

You never know what piece of evidence might make the difference in a car accident case. Keep everything until a lawyer can evaluate it.

Contact an Experienced Car Accident Lawyer Right Away

Set aside the notion of representing yourself. It’s a bad idea. Leave your case in the hands of a professional who knows how to get you the most money available for your injuries and losses.