What Should You Do If Your Insurance Claim Is Denied After a Car Crash?

Mar 08, 2025 |

If you’ve been in a car accident, you know exactly how important it is that the insurance company come through for you. You need that money to pay medical bills, make up for lost wages or salary, compensate you for the repairs you’ve had to make on your car, and give some sort of just reimbursement for the suffering you’ve undergone. A San Antonio car accident lawyer can help you work with an insurance company to get everything that you are entitled to under the law.

What to Do If Your Insurance Claim Is Denied

Contact a San Antonio Car Accident Lawyer

If you haven’t already, now is the time to get in touch with a lawyer who can help you fully understand the policy, the legal elements to your claim, the strength of your case, and exactly why the insurance company is denying your claim. Sometimes, insurance companies almost reflexively deny claims initially, hoping that you will just give up and go away. Once you get a lawyer, you are signaling clearly to the insurance company that that’s not going to happen. That in itself may make them start talking with you and taking your claim more seriously.

Carefully Read Over the Denial With Your Lawyer

Obviously, you need to know exactly why the insurer has denied your claim, and it’s always important to very carefully read over the denial letter. The insurance company is supposed to provide their reasoning for the denial, and in some cases, a careful reading may show that the matter is actually pretty simple. It’s always possible there was a misunderstanding of some kind.

Perhaps you didn’t say something as clearly as you could have, or maybe the insurance adjuster misunderstood what you said. Maybe you made a claim but forgot to attach the evidence needed to prove the claim. Maybe there was just some sort of numbers error. If the issue is simple, your lawyer can quickly get started on a response that points out the error and includes anything necessary to rectify it.

Make a Formal Appeal

The next step, if you determine that it’s not just a simple mistake, is to make an appeal. The insurance company will have an appeal process, and your lawyer will know just how to use it. Your appeal may be more effective than your initial claim now that you have a lawyer writing on your behalf.

Your lawyer may also do a separate investigation into the accident to see if any more evidence can be turned up. Your lawyer may also consult with an accident reconstruction specialist to see if there is another interpretation of the existing evidence. Then, your lawyer will present all of this in a convincing manner to the insurance company.

Next Steps: Filing a Lawsuit

If you have tried to rectify any errors and have made an appeal, and the insurance company is still denying your claim, you may have to step things up a bit. A good car accident lawyer will never tell you that you have a case if they don’t believe you really do. If a lawyer has looked over your evidence and believes it shows clearly that the other driver is responsible to cover your losses and damages, then it’s very likely the insurance company’s denial is unreasonable.

At that point, you may have no choice but to bring a lawsuit. You could potentially bring a lawsuit against the insurance company if you believe they’ve acted in bad faith. Insurers act in bad faith when they delay your claim unreasonably, deny it without giving you a valid reason for the denial, or if it can be shown that they did not conduct a fair investigation into the accident.

Another possibility is to bring a lawsuit against the other driver. While they may not have much to give you themselves, when you put that kind of pressure on them, it may push them to put more pressure on the insurance company that is supposed to be covering them.

What You Can Claim In a Lawsuit

If you do bring a lawsuit, you can claim compensation for two types of damages that you may have suffered in the accident: economic and non-economic.

Economic Damages

Economic damages are everything you’ve lost monetarily. This includes the money you’ve had to pay out to cover medical bills, everything that you’ve lost from your job if you were kept from work, and any property that was damaged or lost in the accident. You’ll need to be able to prove all of these losses with bills and receipts, but you should be able to claim anything that is directly related to the accident.

Non-Economic Damages

Non-economic damages are to compensate you for the suffering and anguish you’ve gone through because of the accident. These damages can’t be tallied up using a calculator because it’s not possible to put a dollar value on pain. They are real, however, and there are typically two ways of calculating them in a case of this nature.

The first way is the multiplier method, and this is the most common. With this method, you take the total of your economic damages and multiply it by a number between one and five. The more serious and life-changing your injuries were, the higher that number will be. The other method is the per diem method. With this method, you simply assign a dollar value to each day that you suffered and then estimate how many days that suffering went on. It is worth noting that, in most cases, you cannot bring a claim only for non-economic damages. You must have verifiable economic damages to bring a claim.

What About Punitive Damages?

Punitive damages are quite famous because they can be extremely high. Whenever a court does award punitive damages, it always makes the news. But it is very rare. Punitive damages punish the liable party rather than reimburse the victim, and these are not normally something you should expect in a car accident case; but talk to your lawyer about the possibility.

If you have a clear case, good evidence, and great losses, and if the insurance company has been denying your claim in bad faith, it’s not impossible that the court will want to hit them with some punitive damages in order to send a message both to them and to other insurance companies operating in our state. Just be aware that while there is no tax on your other damages, because that’s not income you’ve earned but reimbursement for something you’ve lost, there is a hefty federal tax rate on punitive damages. Be sure to talk to your lawyer if this comes up in your case.

If you’ve been in an accident and the other party’s insurance company is denying your claim, stalling, or refusing to conduct a fair investigation, we can help. We can also help if the other party was uninsured and you’re being given the run-around by your own insurance company. Contact the Gamez Law Firm in San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Laredo, McAllen, or Houston today for a free consultation on your case.