When it comes to defending your rights as an insurance policyholder, your personal injury attorney will likely need to stand up to the insurance companies to ensure that they are not acting in bad faith. When insurance companies act in bad faith, they do so in order to save their bottom line from paying out part or the whole of an insurance policy despite having a legal and contractual obligation to do so. Due to the complexity of insurance policies, the insured may not even know that their insurance company is acting in bad faith. Signs that your car insurance company is acting in bad faith include denying claims with vague reasons or no explanation, delay of payment, and misrepresentation of their coverage offerings. That’s why you need to hire legal representation when you’ve been involved in an auto accident.

Here are more signs that your insurance company is acting in bad faith:

Delaying Payment

Recovering payment for damages and injuries covered under your insurance policy is often more difficult than one would think. In many cases, the insurance company will send their legal team to negotiate with your attorney in order to offer you a smaller settlement than you would be entitled to. One of the bargaining chips in their hands is time and they deploy this tactic by delaying payments in order to get you to accept a smaller settlement. This is a bad faith tactic as the insurance companies are betting that you, the victim, will become more desperate as time goes on due to financial stress.

Intentionally Misrepresenting the Policy Terms

Another tactic that insurance companies might use in bad faith is to deny your claim based on their misrepresentation of the policy terms. This tactic is often deployed by referencing an overly vague or complicated clause within the contract in order to deny payment to the victim. This is another reason why it is important to have an attorney on your side as attorneys are skilled at comprehending these documents and will be able to identify when this is attempted. At Eric Blank Injury Attorneys, our legal team has worked on the side of the insurance companies so we understand how they think and which methods they will use in order to deny victims their claims.

Failing to Conduct a Proper Investigation

Another way that insurance companies will act in bad faith when denying or delaying a claim is by conducting an inadequate investigation. Ways that insurance companies will do this is by delaying the investigation (therefore delaying payment as well), disregarding key issues within the investigation, and not communicating with the relevant parties in a timely manner. Each of these can ultimately become signs that an insurance company is acting in bad faith.