You have been injured in an accident, and now the insurance company for the at fault driver is calling you and wanting to take a recorded statement from you. What should you do? Should you talk to them? If you don’t, will they still accept responsibility for the accident and reimburse you for out of pocket expenses and settle your case? If you give the statement, will they send you a copy of it? These and many other questions face injured people trying to handle their claim without the help of a skilled personal injury attorney.

Every respected personal injury lawyer will tell you that you can try and deal with the insurance company on your own, but what is it about your background or experience that leads you to believe that you are operating on the same skill level as a professional claims adjustor whose job every day is to try and cheaply resolve claims and close files paying the least amount of money possible? In other words, you may be a professional in your own chosen field or occupation, but no matter what that job is, if it isn’t related to resolving personal injury and property claims, you will not be working from the same level as a claims adjustor and the lawyers protecting the insurance company’s money.

But getting back to the question at hand, why does the insurance company want take your statement in the first place? It may seem a harmless inquiry on their part, but do NOT be mistaken or mislead. The only reason they want your recorded statement is to lock your testimony in place before you realize you need the help of a lawyer. They will ask you questions about how the accident happened, the speeds of the cars, the distances involved and however you answer those questions, questions you may not even have thought about, those answers will haunt you for the rest of the claim.

Claims adjustors asking injured people for statements are very skilled at getting you to agree with a version of events that may not be accurate, but that you end up agreeing to and that miraculously later seem to help the insurance company. You may ask how that could happen if you are just telling the truth. The answer is that the facts of the event as you saw it happen, all happen very quickly, and as most people do, we don’t spend much time analyzing every second of the event from every different angle. We believe the other person is at fault and believe if we tell the insurance company that, then they will agree with us and pay the claim. The reality is that very rarely if ever happens. Here is why.

Claims adjustors are trained professionals at asking questions in an open ended and general way, and then they restate all of your answers in a way that skews the answers in their favor and get you to agree to it. Later, they deny your claim and state that based on your voluntary recorded statement, that you agreed was under oath, they don’t believe they are responsible for your accident and deny your claim. Or they tell you that the way you explained what happened, you are also at fault or partially so and then they try and reduce how much they will pay you because of your own fault.

So, should you give a statement to the insurance company? Let’s run a simple test: Do you know how many feet per second a car moves when it is going 35 miles per hour? Do you know how much the average human head weighs? Do you know the average amount of time it takes to react to an accident about to happen and hit your brakes? Do you know how long it takes your car to stop if you slam on your brakes when you are going 30 miles per hour? Or how far it will travel? Do you know how much force your bumper can absorb? Do you know if any of the force the bumper absorbs is transferred to you in the car? And if it does, how much? Probably every claims adjustor knows the exact answers to those questions and all the similar varieties of those questions, all which focus on how an accident happens and who is at fault and what the injuries may be. If you can’t answer each of those questions correctly without researching answers to them, then NO, YOU SHOULD NOT GIVE A STATEMENT TO THE INSURANCE COMPANY!!!

Well, what should you do when they ask you for a recorded under oath statement? Play it smart and leave it to a professional to help you. Call, immediately, for a personal injury attorney you trust or you learn of from a trusted advisor and call right away. Tell the insurance company you don’t have time to talk and put them off until you talk to a good personal injury lawer. Remember, the golden rule to never forget is that the insurance company for the person that caused the accident IS NOT ON YOUR SIDE!!! Good luck!