USAA Reminds me of a Chinese Silk Market

I am in China right now on a adoption trip. We’ve spent 10 days in Beijing. Yesterday we went to a “silk market.” This is a place where there are literally hundreds of vendors selling everything from trinkets to fake Armani. If you express any interest in something they quote you a price. The first price they quote you is totally unreasonable and ridiculous.

The key is to be prepared to walk away. It was actually fun to see how many “dollars per foot” you could get as a discount as you walked away–sometimes ending up at 10% of the original asking price.

This reminds me of our recent experience in several cases with USAA car insurance company. (Your case may be different and our past results are not indicative of your future…but there is a teaching point here!)

In several cases USAA made absolutely ridiculous offers in clear cut liability cases. The cause of each accident was clear. The medical care was unchallenged yet USAA made initial offers that would have, in one case, not even paid the medical bills!

We walked away and filed suit. In one case there was a significant increase in the offer–just by filing suit– and in another the offer doubled–just by filing suit.

This tells me that it may be time, once again, to just ignore the pre-suit settlement process. USAA and other car insurance companies acting this way are just wasting my time in the pre-suit process.

Of course, this all works if they know that we will go to trial. If your lawyer is one they know won’t go to trial your results, as they say, “may differ.”

More from benglasslaw

• Types of Damages Available in a Virginia Accident Case
• Delay, Delay then….”surprise…your claim will expire!”
• Notify Your Insurance Company if You Caused a Car Accident

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 4:32 pm and is filed under The Insurance Adjuster. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.