Public Adjusters Impact on Property Damage Claims

So, what role do Public Adjusters play in the process of trying to force your insurance company to pay for the damage claim that they’re supposed to pay for? You have to realize that the adjusters who work for an insurance company or private adjusters – they’re paid by the insurance company, they follow the insurance company’s rules. And while insurance companies aren’t supposed to be allowed to financially incentivize their adjusters to lower the results of claims, I think it’s hard to imagine any system where adjusters who save the insurance company money don’t wind up getting rewarded, at the very least, with the longevity in their job or promotion. So the incentive is there, and when you don’t have an adjuster who works for you, essentially they’re coming to the fight with one more person than you are, and it puts you at a disadvantage. A public adjuster is someone who has all that training, and maybe even more than the private adjuster would have, but they work for you. Usually, they work on a contingency fee, similar to what an attorney works on so you’re not paying them out of pocket. And when you hire them to come in, they are able to not only use their expertise to make decisions about the claim, but also they can go through and think of things that you wouldn’t. Bring people in to give quotes that you wouldn’t have thought of. Do an investigation that you don’t know how to do. Bring all that evidence to bear and put it into a package to send to the insurance company that makes the insurance company realize there’s more data here than we thought there was. And maybe, this homeowner or this business owner is more willing to fight than the average person, so we’re going to give them a little more to try to get this resolved. So you want a public adjuster on your side to be the counterbalance to the private adjuster that’s always going to be across from you. If you get into a situation where you hire a public adjuster and an attorney, you want the attorney’s office and the Public Adjusters office to be able to work together and to be able to take that contingency fee and share it so that you don’t wind up paying out an inordinate amount of the claim. And for our firm, we’re used to working with Public Adjusters. And we will often have a lower contingency fee on a case where a public adjuster has done a lot of work, in part to make sure that we’re not taking too much money out of our client’s pocket. But, also in part to recognize the fact that the public adjuster is a very valuable addition to that team and provides a lot of extra information that we would have had to gather ourself, and instead is all neatly done in a package for us. I personally think a public adjuster is a very, very valuable part of any Property and Casualty claim.