Car Accident Attorney in McMinnville, Oregon: Protecting Your Claim From the First Call

Hiring us now ensures that your legal rights about your injury claim are protected. You will probably be contacted by an insurance company claims adjuster for the at-fault driver. They may offer you a very small sum of money now to settle your injury claim. They will also insist that you sign a paper that will allow them to get all your personal medical and employment records.

Don’t do either of these things! What the adjuster won’t tell you is that if you say yes to their small offer, you just permanently signed away all your legal rights and you are prevented from any further recovery, even if you find out later that you are hurt much worse than you first thought (which is very common). Signing the paper to allow them to get your records lets them dig into every little thing that happened in your life going back to the day you were born, which is none of their business.

When you hire us, we immediately contact the insurance company in writing. After that they can’t talk to you anymore. They have to go through us. We also immediately cancel any authorizations you may have signed. This protects your privacy, so that your claim can be settled fairly when YOU are ready, not on their terms.

Great question! Another reason it is so important to have an attorney working for you to protect your rights. Generally, if the accident happened in Oregon, you have no more than 2 years from the date of the accident to either settle your claim or file a lawsuit in court. If you don’t, all your rights will be lost forever. An experienced law firm like ours has the expertise to evaluate the facts and determine what time period applies to your claim, and then either settle your case or file suit within that time. These time periods are called “statutes of limitation”. If you let the statute of limitations expire, you lose your case simply because you let the clock run out. Don’t do that. Hire us and we will take care of it.

It’s still a free country. You don’t have to talk to them, but they don’t have to stop calling. And, adjusters can be pretty pushy and aggressive. Once you hire us, we immediately contact the at-fault party’s insurance company in writing, and instruct the claim representative to route all further communication through our office.

Nothing up front. We are paid a percentage of what we recover for you, and if we recover nothing you owe us no attorney fee. We advance the costs of the claim, like your medical records and any filing fees, and settle them out of the recovery at the end, with a written statement showing every dollar. The first meeting is free. Call 503-472-3770 and we will go over it in ten minutes.

Before you talk to the other driver’s insurance adjuster, and before you sign anything. The adjuster’s job is to settle your claim for as little as possible, as early as possible, and the first offer usually comes before you know how badly you are hurt. Once we are hired we contact the insurer in writing, their calls stop, and nothing gets signed until you are ready. If the crash was yesterday, that is the right day to call.

Then your own policy may have to pay. Oregon requires your uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage to match your liability limits, and it stacks on top of the other driver’s policy. If the driver who hit you carries $25,000 and you carry $100,000 of UM/UIM, there is $125,000 available for your injuries, not $25,000. There are notices and deadlines that protect that claim; we send them. See our uninsured and underinsured motorist page for how it works.

The ones we see most come off Highway 18, between McMinnville and the coast and where it meets 99W, and off 99W through Dundee and Newberg, where the traffic backs up and people follow too close. Two of the firm’s larger recoveries were Highway 18 crashes. [Gary: name the two or three spots in town you see most often, and we will put them here.]