Top Tip! Solicitors can get up to four times more!
So you have a whiplash claim and you have rejected or countered the first offer from the insurers, and now you have a new offer that (I hope!) is better than the first one. Should you accept it?
An insurer can make an offer at anytime during a claim, and it is the important role of your solicitor to correctly advise you as to whether an offer from the other side should be accepted or rejected. So it all depends on the amount of the offer – read on for more info.
Accepting and rejecting offers
Any offers that come through can be accepted or rejected at anytime by you. It’s your claim, so it’s totally up to you as to whether you accept or reject an offer. It is the role of your lawyers to advise you as to whether you should accept or reject an offer. The solicitor’s wealth of legal experience and knowhow puts them in the advantageous position of being able to inform you of this.
So firstly, if you’re dealing with the insurers directly, big mistake! You have no one on your side to advise you and you’re likely, and statistically, going to under settle the claim.
Is the second offer normal to accept?
Well it totally depends on the case and the offer amount. We have seen sometimes where it is, but on many occasions insurers will offer the lowest amounts possible so it takes a negation process involving several offers to reach the right amount.
Insurers are private profit making companies whose duty is to their shareholders, so they want to minimise payouts in order to maximise profits and keep their shareholders happy. So you will often get rubbish offers at the start, and if you are dealing directly, you should be very worried that the offers they are making to you are probably no good anyway. As I say, you can get up to four times more with a proper lawyer.
So what is the right offer to accept?
It’s all down to the individual case. In my whiplash claim, I think had three offers but the other side ended up settling on our final counter offer to their third offer. I settled for £6,500.00 and the first offer was around £4,500.00 I believe (from memory). So I got a huge £2,000.00 increase just because of the bargaining power of my solicitor (who is also my boss!) which was great.
So if you need to know what offer is acceptable, you need a lawyer with medical evidence to tell you. The medical evidence needs to be from a proper qualified medico-legal expert – not your GP or from A&E – and this is the key evidence a solicitor needs to tell you how much your claim is worth, and as such, what offers can be acceptable.
Without this powerful combination of a qualified personal injury lawyer and a medico-legal report, you could be doomed to join the victims of under settling their claims and potentially losing out on thousand of pounds in compensation.
