Starting A Claim With The Insurance Company

After an accident, you return home from the scene or the hospital and ask yourself "What do I do now?" You have a couple of options. You can call an attorney to help you (see How to Choose an Injury Attorney), or you can try and figure out how to get started on the claim yourself.

Assuming you chose to get moving yourself, you must first contact the at-fault party's insurance company and report the claim. You first must have the name of the responsible driver and the name of his or her insurance company. Hopefully, you also have the policy number, which makes things go much easier. All of this information is usually obtained at the accident scene, assuming all the parties are not in need of medical transport to a hospital. If you don't get the basic information at the scene (also, some people refuse to give it or they give the wrong information), then the best place to obtain it is from the police report if one was done by the local police. Police reports can usually be obtained a few days after the accident, and sometimes you can call and get the information from the police department even if the report is not final (see Obtaining a Police Report).

But what if a report was not done and for whatever reason you didn't get the other driver's insurance information? Then you must locate the other driver and request the information. At my law office, I have an in-house investigator who routinely pursues and locates insurance information.

Most numbers for the insurance companies are easy to find on the internet, but I have compiled a listing of Insurance Company Phone Numbers. When you call the claim in, be ready for a long call as lots of questions are asked. At my law office, we make these calls ourselves and take this burden off of the client.

During this initial call, you should receive a claim number and establish an expectation of when you should hear back from an adjuster. You must stay on top of this and continue to call if you don't hear back in the time frame quoted. Oftentimes it's the squeaky wheel that gets the attention.

At the beginning of an insurance claim, there are a few main things that arise. Please read about the following issues before you proceed forward on your own: