What to Do When the Insurance Adjuster Calls After a Texas Accident

First Question: Whose Adjuster Is It?

Everything about the call depends on the answer, so ask it first. Two very different people may be calling:

Your own insurance company's adjuster. You have a contract with this company. Your policy requires you to give prompt notice of the accident and to cooperate reasonably with their investigation — and if you need your own coverage (collision, personal injury protection, uninsured/underinsured motorist), this is who handles it. Cooperate, but remember that even your own insurer's interests are not identical to yours, particularly if an uninsured or underinsured motorist claim puts you and your insurer on opposite sides of a valuation.

The other driver's insurance company's adjuster. This is usually who calls first, and this is the call this guide is about. You have no contract with this company. You owe it no statement, no signature, no authorization, and no deadline. Texas law does not require the at-fault driver's insurer to look out for your interests — its legal duties run to its own policyholder. The adjuster may be genuinely pleasant. The adjuster is also trained, measured, and compensated on closing claims efficiently, and every question is designed with the claim's value in mind.

Why They Call So Fast

The speed is strategic. In the first days after a crash, you do not yet know the full extent of your injuries — soft-tissue, spinal, and head injuries often reveal themselves over days and weeks. You do not have the crash report. You have not talked to a lawyer. You are stressed, possibly in pain, and often worried about money because a car is wrecked and work is being missed.

That is precisely the moment when a recorded statement is most likely to contain a damaging phrase ("I'm fine, just sore"), and when a fast, modest check is most likely to be accepted. The adjuster is not doing anything illegal by calling early. But you should understand that the timing serves the insurer, not you — and that nothing requires you to match their pace.

What You Actually Have to Do — and What You Don't

You should:

• Report the accident to your own insurer promptly. Your policy requires notice, and late notice can jeopardize your own coverage.
• Get and follow through with medical care. For your health first — and because gaps in treatment become the insurer's favorite argument that you were not really hurt.
• Keep records: the crash report (Form CR-3, available through TxDOT's crash records system), photos, witness names, medical bills, and every letter the insurers send.

You are not required to:

• Give the other side's insurer a recorded statement. Ever. You may decline politely and permanently.
• Sign a medical authorization — especially the broad, open-ended kind that reaches your entire medical history rather than the accident-related records.
• Accept, or respond to, a settlement offer on their timeline. Your deadline is the statute of limitations — generally two years in Texas — not the adjuster's end-of-month closing target.
• Estimate your injuries, guess at fault, or fill silences. "I don't know yet" is a complete answer.

Five Tactics to Recognize

1. The recorded statement request. Framed as routine — "just to get your side." Its real function is to lock in your account before you know your injuries, and to harvest phrases that undercut the claim later. Casual questions ("How are you today?" — "Fine, thanks") make it into the file.
2. The blanket medical authorization. Presented as necessary to "process the claim." Accident-related records can be provided in a controlled way; a fishing license into decades of your medical history cannot be un-signed.
3. The fast, friendly lowball. A check within days or weeks, before the full cost of treatment, lost income, or your car's diminished value is knowable. If your crash involved a newer vehicle, our guides on accidents in a brand-new car and rental car accidents explain the property-side claims adjusters rarely volunteer.
4. "You don't need a lawyer for this." An adjuster discouraging representation is telling you something useful: represented claims cost insurers more. Draw the honest inference.
5. Slow-walking and silence. Unreturned calls and repeated document requests are a strategy too — frustration and financial pressure produce cheap settlements. Texas law sets deadlines on insurers for exactly this reason, discussed below.

What to Say: A Word-for-Word Script

You do not need to be hostile, and you do not need to be clever. Calm and brief wins. When the other driver's insurer calls:

Then stop talking. Write down the adjuster's name, company, phone number, and claim number, note the date and time of the call, and end it courteously. You have given them nothing to use and lost nothing by it.

The Texas Rules Working in Your Favor

Texas law does place real obligations on insurers, and knowing them changes the tone of the process:

• The Prompt Payment of Claims Act (Texas Insurance Code Chapter 542) sets deadlines for claims against your own insurer: generally about 15 days to acknowledge a claim and request documents, about 15 business days after receiving requested items to accept or reject it, and about 5 business days to pay once a claim is accepted. Insurers that violate these deadlines can owe interest on the claim plus attorney's fees.
• The duty of good faith and fair dealing requires your own insurer to handle your claim fairly — and Texas law provides remedies when an insurer denies or delays a claim it knew, or should have known, was owed.
• Proportionate responsibility (Chapter 33 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code) means you can recover even if you were partly at fault, as long as your share is not more than 50 percent — your recovery is reduced by your percentage. This is worth knowing because adjusters often assert exaggerated fault percentages precisely to discount claims. Their percentage is an opening position, not a ruling.
• The two-year statute of limitations is your deadline — and your leverage. An insurer's incentive to pay fair value comes from the credible possibility of suit. That possibility exists for two years, and no adjuster's "this offer expires Friday" changes it.

The Texas Department of Insurance also operates a consumer help line and complaint process for claim-handling problems, which exists precisely because these disputes are common.

When the Quick Offer Sounds Tempting

Sometimes the early number sounds workable — especially with bills arriving and a paycheck missed. Before saying yes, run the honest checklist: Have you finished treatment, or at least reached the point where a doctor can say what your future care will involve? Do you know your total medical billing, including what your health insurer paid and may need to be repaid? Have you counted lost wages and, in serious cases, reduced future earning capacity? Has anyone valued the harm beyond the bills — the pain, the limitations, the parts of your life the injury has changed?

If the answer to any of these is no, then the offer is not a valuation of your claim. It is a bid on your uncertainty. A release signed today closes the claim forever, no matter what an MRI shows next month. There is no version of a fair settlement that cannot wait until you know what you are settling.

How Representation Changes the Conversation

The moment a claim is represented, the calls to you stop — communications go through the firm, the recorded-statement question disappears, and the medical records flow in a controlled, accident-related way. More fundamentally, the claim's value changes because its posture changes: an adjuster evaluating a file from a firm that prepares cases for trial is pricing the real risk of a Dallas County jury, not the likelihood that an unrepresented person gives up.

Michael A. Crozier, Esq. represents people seriously injured — and families who have lost loved ones — in car accidents, 18-wheeler and commercial vehicle crashes, and other preventable tragedies across Dallas and throughout Texas. Cases are handled on a contingency fee: no fee unless there is a recovery. And the first conversation is free, confidential, and genuinely informational — you will leave it knowing what your claim involves, what deadlines apply, and what we would do next, whether or not you hire anyone at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

This guide provides general information about Texas law and is not legal advice for any specific situation. Statutory deadlines are summarized generally and exceptions apply. Reading this page does not create an attorney-client relationship; please consult a licensed Texas attorney about the facts of your case.