A first settlement offer is assembled from coded medical records, software severity ranges, a fault percentage and a policy limit. Here is what to check in each.
The number an adjuster reads out over the phone is not a judgment about what happened to you. It is the output of a process, and the process has parts you can inspect: a set of medical bills reduced to billing codes, a software range, a fault percentage assigned by someone who was not there, and a hard ceiling written into a policy you have never seen. Each part can be wrong in a way that costs money. A careful reader checks them in order, because an error early in the chain quietly caps everything downstream.
Start with the records, because that is where the file starts
Before any valuation happens, your treatment gets translated into codes: diagnosis codes describing what the provider believes is wrong, and procedure codes describing what was billed. That translation is done by clerks and software at the provider's office, not by the doctor who examined you, and it is frequently imprecise. A sprain coded as a strain, an imaging study coded without the finding it produced, a follow-up visit recorded as routine when it documented new symptoms: these are common. Request your own records and the itemized billing, read the codes against what you remember happening, and ask the provider to correct what does not match.
Check the narrative too. Adjusters read the first page of the emergency department note and the last page of the discharge summary more carefully than anything in between. If the intake form says you denied neck pain because the back pain was louder that night, that line will follow the file for months. It can be supplemented by a later note that explains the sequence, but only if someone asks the provider to write one. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration oversees crash reporting standards, and the police report's own coding of the collision type and impact direction will be cross-checked against your described injuries.
What the evaluation software actually does
Most large carriers run bodily injury claims through claim-evaluation software that converts the coded record into a range. The inputs are mechanical: which body parts are involved, how many treatment days, what kind of provider delivered the care, whether there was objective imaging, how long the symptoms persisted, and whether any permanent impairment was documented. The output is not a single figure but a band, and the adjuster has authority somewhere inside it. What the software does not read is your description of how the injury changed your work, your sleep or your ability to lift a child, unless a provider wrote it down in a note the software can see.
Two inputs move the band more than people expect. The first is a gap in treatment, meaning any stretch of weeks between visits, which the model reads as recovery whether or not you stopped because of a deductible, a work schedule or a waiting list. The second is provider type, because care delivered by a physician with imaging tends to score differently than the same care delivered without it. If you had a real reason for a gap, a layoff, a pregnancy, a second job, get that reason into the record contemporaneously rather than explaining it later in a letter.
The fault percentage and the ceiling above it
Whatever the range says, the carrier then applies a comparative fault percentage, and in most states that reduction comes straight off the top. Adjusters assign it early, often from the police narrative alone, and it tends to stick unless it is challenged with something specific: a scene photograph, a dashcam file, a witness who was never interviewed, a signal timing sequence. Ask what percentage has been assigned and what it is based on. A twenty percent allocation on a fifty thousand dollar valuation is a ten thousand dollar question, and it is usually the cheapest thing in the file to argue about.
Above all of it sits the at-fault driver's policy limit, which functions as a ceiling no amount of documentation will lift. Many states allow you to request disclosure of limits, and the request is worth making before you spend months building a case the policy cannot pay. If the limits are low relative to your bills, the useful questions shift: whether there is an umbrella policy, whether an employer's coverage applies, whether your own underinsured motorist coverage sits behind it, and what your health plan will want back from any of it.
What moves it and what does not
Documentation moves the number. Corrected codes, a physician's note connecting the injury to a specific work restriction, wage records from an employer, a permanent impairment rating: these change inputs the model reads. Tone does not move it. Neither does a long letter about how the crash felt, nor a deadline you impose, nor a figure you name without arithmetic behind it. The productive conversation is narrow and specific: here is the code that was wrong, here is the corrected one, here is the note explaining the eleven week gap, here is why the fault split should be zero.
Ask the adjuster to walk through the components, write down what they say, and compare it against the records you already pulled. Most first offers contain at least one input that is simply inaccurate, and the inaccuracy is usually fixable by a phone call to a provider's billing office rather than by anything adversarial.