How Long Does It Take the Insurance Company Take to Respond to a Demand Letter?

You must understand that the insurance adjuster is not trying to be fair with you and generally has no obligation to be fair. They want to pay you as little as possible. When you complain about how long an offer takes, you are showing weakness. You are telegraphing that you desperately want to settle. If an insurance company does not respond to our demand letter in a timely fashion, our lawyers file a lawsuit.

We performed an analysis of 110 cases at Miller & Zois to answer the question of how long individual insurance companies take to respond to demand packages.

The chart below shows personal injury claims handled by our firm, broken down by the insurance company. Our lawyers compared the time from when our demand package on behalf of our clients was submitted to the insurance company, to the time it took them to respond with their initial offer.

We did not include cases where our client became tired of waiting for the insurance company and instructed us to file suit.

As the timeline chart illustrates, the average response time from the insurance companies that handle most of the claims is about two months.

Our lawyers always want to push the insurance company along. We want to settle every car accident case as quickly as we can. But we cannot advance the case at a speed that will compromise the value of the case. Our second goal is to get a quick settlement. But our first goal is to maximize the value of your claim.

Obviously, there are real limitations to this study. You would need a sampling of thousands to get reliable data within a small standard deviation, particularly given the factor at play in individual cases.

Some factors that influence the time it takes for the insurance company to respond to our demand package with their first offer. Some of these response time factors include:

• Whether there had been earlier communications regarding the client's injuries and medical bills
• How the amount of medical bills compares to the policy limits for the at-fault driver
• The amount and complexity of the medical records and bills
• Whether or not the client had any previous accidents and/or treatment
• Internal circumstances within the insurance company, such as the caseload of the adjuster
• The size of the insurance policy at issue

The last factor, the size of the insurance policy, is a big factor. Take, for example, an insurance company like Progressive that typically writes small policies that are cover only the state minimum of $30,000 per claim. This means that when the value of the claim exceeds $30,000, the claims adjuster can put down their pencil. That speeds up the process.

Larger cases with companies that write larger commercial policies - like Travelers, Chubb or Brethren - are going to take longer to evaluate. Plus, there are more bureaucratic lawyers with larger cases. The bigger the claim, the higher you have to go up the food chain to get upper management to sign off on the evaluation of the case. This takes more time which is why a trucking insurer is going to take longer than passenger car insurance companies.

• Why is it taking so long to get a settlement check?
• How to write a demand letter, along with sample demand letters in different types of personal injury cases
• How to figure out the settlement value of your claim

Is there a path to getting a faster response to your demand letter to get a faster settlement? Absolutely. Simply become the squeaky wheel and call the adjuster every day, adamantly complaining that the settlement offer is taking too long.

There is just one problem with this route. You are telling the adjuster that you really just want to settle your case and you have no willingness to go to trial.

Adjusters smell blood. The settlement offer reflects that perceived weakness in your willingness to file suit. Parenthetically, this is why it is important to have a lawyer in serious cases that have a history of success in a courtroom. If your law firm does not have a history of success, your offer is going to suffer.

Also, submitting records and bills a bit at a time does not speed up an offer to settle unless the injuries are severe and the bills are high at the beginning of the claim. The insurance adjuster might be concerned about their driver's policy limits and legal exposure.