Why Have an Experienced Chicago Car Accident Attorney on Your Side in Settlement Negotiations?
If you’ve been injured in a car accident, you are likely to find yourself in negotiations with a trained insurance adjuster who will make you a settlement offer—in other words offer you a certain amount of money, in exchange for which you would sign an agreement stating that you would not pursue any other compensation for harm that you suffered from the accident.
You may wonder why you might need an experienced Chicago car accident attorney on your side in this process. What would such an attorney do that you might not do on your own? There are a number of answers to that question; one of them has to do with the negotiation process itself.
Even if you consider yourself a forceful and competent negotiator, the reality is that in any negotiation success depends in part on knowing the norms and standards of the particular field in which the negotiation takes place. Do you know what cases comparable to yours have settled for in the past, or which cases went to trial instead, when settlement negotiations failed? Do you know what the outcome of such trials has been in recent years? An insurance negotiator would know those things; you might be able to find out such information on your own, as well, but it would require a substantial time investment. An experienced car accident attorney, however, should be at least as well informed as the adjustor facing him or her.
Another issue is that many people tend to defer to authority, and consider expertise a type of authority. Realizing that the adjuster knows more about the compensation process than you do, you may negotiate less forcefully than you would in a different context, and accept arguments and premises that an attorney would question.
Finally, trained negotiators are aware of something called the “anchor effect.” In a negotiation, the first offer may act as a type of anchor: people presented with a particular number may adjust their expectations based on that number (unless they know enough to realize that the number proposed is completely unjustified in that particular situation). When negotiating with an experienced attorney, adjusters would be less likely to make an overly-low offer to begin with.
