You can, and sometimes you should. If nobody was hurt and you are sorting out a repair estimate, negotiating with the insurance company yourself is a reasonable thing to do. But once there is an injury involved, most people are better off having a lawyer handle the claim, and the reason is simple. An injury claim has a lot of moving parts, the insurance company has tools for creating leverage that you do not have, and several of the mistakes you can make along the way cannot be fixed later.

Here is what handling it yourself actually looks like, start to finish, so you can decide with real information instead of a guess.

Are you allowed to negotiate your own claim?

Of course. No law in California, or any other state, requires you to hire a lawyer to settle an injury claim, and insurance companies resolve claims directly with unrepresented people every day. Nobody is going to stop you or tell you that you need permission.

The real question is whether you want to take on the work, whether you know what the claim is worth and whether you are getting full value for your claim. Professional injury attorneys do this kind of work every day, so they have a good base to work from.

What deadlines does the insurance company have to meet?

This is the part most people never find out about, and it is genuinely useful to know. California holds auto insurers to a published set of claim-handling rules, and three of the deadlines are worth writing down:

• 15 days to acknowledge your claim after you report it, and to send you the forms and instructions you need in order to prove it.
• 15 days to respond to a letter or message from you that expects a reply.
• 40 days after it has your proof of claim to accept or deny it, in whole or in part. If the company needs more time, it has to tell you why in writing inside that window, and then update you every 30 days while it decides.

Knowing those dates changes what you can say on the phone. Instead of telling an adjuster it has been a while, you can point to the day the company received your proof of claim and the deadline that has now passed. Keep a simple log of what you sent and when.

Why you cannot sue the other driver's insurance company

Here is something that surprises almost everyone, and it is the single biggest reason an unrepresented claim can stall out.

Those claim-handling rules apply to the insurance company. You are not the person who gets to enforce them. In California, the right to sue an insurance company over the way it handled a claim belongs to its own policyholder. When another driver hurts you, you are a stranger to that driver's policy. So if the other side's insurer drags its feet, offers you very little, or simply stops returning your calls, you cannot sue the company for it. You can file a complaint with the state insurance regulator, which is a real option and sometimes a useful one, but that is a regulatory process and not a lawsuit.

The only lawsuit available to you is against the driver who hit you, and that lawsuit is your leverage. Being clearly in the right is not the same thing as having a strong position.

What you actually have to do to make a claim

None of these steps is difficult on its own. There are just a lot of them, and they run over several months.

• Report the claim, get a claim number, and write down the adjuster's name and direct line.
• Request the traffic collision report from whichever agency responded.
• Deal with the vehicle separately, which means the appraisal, the repair shop or total loss valuation, and the rental car.
• Get through your medical treatment, and keep going to your appointments. Gaps in treatment get used to argue that you recovered sooner than you did.
• Request complete records and itemized bills from every provider you saw, which usually means a written request to each one and a wait of two to four weeks.
• Track your time away from work and get it documented by your employer.
• Find out who has a claim on your settlement, such as a health plan or a hospital, and what they say they are owed.
• Put the whole thing together in a written demand, send it, and then negotiate.

The order matters more than people expect. Most self-handled claims go wrong in the first two weeks, because the adjuster calls early, the conversation is pleasant, and a number gets discussed before there is anything to discuss it with.

What evidence do you need to make a credible claim?

An adjuster evaluates what is actually in the file. Not what happened to you, and not what you say on the phone. These are the documents that make up a credible claim, and what each one is for.

• The traffic collision report. Read the narrative and the diagram, not just the citation line.
• Complete medical records, not the discharge summary. Ask every provider for the full file, including imaging reports and physical therapy notes. A discharge summary says you were treated and released. The imaging report and the therapy notes are usually where the real picture of the injury lives.
• Itemized billing statements from each provider, plus your health plan's explanation of benefits for each one. You need both, because what was billed and what was paid are different numbers.
• A wage letter on company letterhead, signed by someone in payroll, stating your rate of pay, the dates you missed, and the gross amount you lost. A text message from your supervisor will not carry this.
• Photographs, dated, of both vehicles, the scene, and any visible injury.
• The property damage appraisal or the total loss valuation.
• Your own declarations page. Not the insurance card, the declarations page. That is the document that lists your actual coverage limits, and it is where you find out whether you have medical payments coverage or underinsured motorist coverage. Those two can end up mattering more than anything the other driver's insurer does.

Why the number on your medical bill is not the number in your claim

This one costs people real money in both directions, so it is worth being clear.

California does not let you claim the sticker price of your medical care. You recover the lesser of what was actually paid for the treatment or what the treatment was reasonably worth. If a hospital billed $38,000 for an emergency visit and an MRI, and your health plan paid $7,400, and the provider accepted that as payment in full, then the medical part of your claim is built on roughly $7,400 and not $38,000. Adjusters know this rule very well. A demand letter that adds up billed charges tells them right away that you do not.

The other direction matters even more. Because the hard numbers are usually smaller than people expect, much of the value sits in the part of the claim with no invoice attached: the pain, and the things you could not do. That argument has to be made deliberately and in writing, and an adjuster will not build it for you.

How the demand letter works

When your treatment is finished and your records are in, you put it all in one letter. A good demand letter does five things in order:

• Explains why the other driver is at fault and what supports that.
• Walks through your treatment in order, from the day of the crash forward.
• Adds up the losses that have documents behind them.
• Makes a specific argument about what the injury cost you beyond those receipts.
• Names a figure that is higher than what you would actually accept, and gives a date for a response.

Expect the first counteroffer to be low. That is not an insult, it is how the process starts. The most useful thing to ask in response is not whether they can do better, but what in your file they are discounting and why. Once an adjuster gives you a reason, you can go find the record that answers it.

Five things that quietly cost people money

Most of these are not reversible.

• Giving the other driver's insurer a recorded statement. You are not required to. Your own policy does obligate you to cooperate with your own insurance company, which is a different situation. A recorded statement given three weeks in, before you know how bad the injury actually is, tends to become the ceiling on your claim.
• Signing a blanket medical authorization. It hands over your entire medical history, which is how a back complaint from 2019 becomes the explanation for your current back injury. Gather and send the records for this injury yourself instead.
• Settling before your treatment is finished. There is no reopening it later. If a shoulder that was supposed to get better in six weeks turns into surgery in month five, the settlement you signed in month two is the end of it.
• Not reading what a release covers. A property damage release and an injury release are usually separate documents. Usually is not always. Read what the paper says it settles before you sign anything attached to a check.
• Posting about it. The gym check-in, the hiking photo, the comment about feeling much better. All of it can be used, and none of it comes with context.

What does a lawyer do that you cannot do yourself?

This is less about negotiating skill than most people assume. A good lawyer has tools available that simply are not available to you.

• A credible lawsuit. Most claims settle, but what a claim settles for depends on what everyone believes would happen if it did not. An insurance company knows whether the person on the other end can actually file suit, take depositions, and put the case in front of a jury, and that assessment affects every number that follows.
• Reducing what comes off the top. If a health plan says it is owed $31,000 and that gets argued down to $12,000, you are $19,000 better off and the settlement figure never changed at all. California also limits what a hospital's lien can take to no more than half of what is left for you after fees and costs. Many people pay a lien in full that they were never required to pay in full.
• Finding coverage you did not know about. The other driver's limits are often the real ceiling on a claim. California's minimum has been $30,000 per injured person since the start of 2025, and plenty of people carry exactly that. When your losses are bigger, the next money usually comes from your own underinsured motorist or medical payments coverage, and an underinsured motorist claim can be lost completely by settling with the other driver without permission first.
• Knowing what the claim is worth. This is the hardest one to see from the outside. Knowing what a particular injury, with a particular treatment history, in front of a particular insurer, is worth comes from having seen a few hundred of them.

How much does a lawyer cost?

Almost all personal injury lawyers, including us, work on a contingency fee. You pay nothing up front and nothing by the hour. The fee is a percentage of what is recovered, and if nothing is recovered, there is no fee. At Westwood Law that percentage is 33-1/3% if the case settles before a lawsuit is filed, and 40% after.

Third party costs, things like records fees and filing fees, are normally advanced by the firm and reimbursed out of the recovery at the end. The practical effect is that you do not need money to hire a personal injury lawyer, which is the whole point of the arrangement. The full breakdown of what a personal injury lawyer charges covers how fees and costs differ and what comes out of a settlement before you see it.

The question worth asking is not whether the fee is a real cost. It is. The question is whether the claim ends up bigger by more than the fee, and how a lawyer increases a settlement goes through the specific ways that happens.

A practical rule of thumb

If nobody was injured, handle it yourself. Get the car fixed, use the deadlines above to keep things moving, and keep the fee.

If you were injured, treat the claim as yours to manage until the moment somebody asks you to sign something. Gather your records, ask hard questions, hold the insurance company to its deadlines. But before you sign a release, have one conversation with a lawyer about what the claim is actually worth. That conversation should cost you nothing, and the release is the one step in this entire process that cannot be undone.

If you would rather not run the claim at all, that is reasonable too, and it is the more common choice for a reason. Our car accident attorneys will tell you on the first call which parts of your claim are likely to move and which are not.