Nuisance Settlement Claims

There are times when you are involved in an accident but are informed that you have no claim. What do you do then? This article will discuss nuisance settlement claims and how they work.

It must be noted that in any accident and or injury settlement claim there are two sides; on the one hand you have multimillion-dollar claims while on the other hand you have what are called nuisance value settlements. One legal dictionary describes a nuisance settlement as “an early out of court settlement, often made when the claim is frivolous (without merit)”. The term itself sounds annoying, however, the reason behind calling it a nuisance is that the insurance adjuster thinks or assumes that a claim is worthless or worth nothing. There are a number of reasons whereby an insurance adjuster comes to this conclusion regarding a claim; some of these are:

• Where the individual that is putting forward the claim was completely at fault for the incident
• Another party who is not the insured individual was completely at fault for the incident; therefore, the adjuster is not liable for paying any damages
• The injuries sustained by the claimant were not as a result of the accident
• There are no real injuries that the claimant suffered

As is noticeable from the list above, nuisance value settlement in Alaska [https://www.crowsonlaw.com/auto-accidents/2018/05/15/personal-injury-claims-nuisance-value-settlements/] or anywhere else are a result of an insurance adjuster completely denying a claim and stating that the insurance company won’t pay any compensation.

In the majority of cases, after an insurance adjuster initially refuses to settle a claim, they eventually offer a settlement for the case for a small amount and this is known as “nuisance value”. The basic idea of the term nuisance value is that the insurance company considers it better to pay a little bit of money rather than dealing with a nuisance of a claim that won’t go away. It must be noted that the insurance adjusters themselves often do not use the term nuisance value, however, considering that they make a pretty low offer that has no link whatsoever to the damages formula, that is what it is – a nuisance!

Similar to other accident settlements, nuisance value settlements have no fixed amount. Where there are medical bills that are less than $1,000, the nuisance value settlement will often be the amount of those medical bills. Or it could be half of the medical bills and no compensation being made for loss of income, pain and suffering or any other general damages suffered by the claimant.

In the event that the claimant is unable to show any real injuries, that is proof of small medical bills, proof of soft tissue injuries being diagnosed, the insurance adjustor often makes a nuisance value offer of $500 – $750. In contrast, where the claimant has medical bills and loss of income that is valued in the thousands of dollars as well as a serious or permanent injury which may go up to $10,000 to $15000 when using the damages formula, the insurance adjustor may make a nuisance value settlement of between $2,000 to $3,000