After a motorcycle or bicycle accident, the other driver’s insurance company will contact you. The adjuster will sound helpful. They may offer to “resolve things quickly.” What they’re actually doing is trying to close your claim for as little money as possible.
NHTSA data shows over 130,000 cyclists are injured in traffic crashes across the U.S. every year. Insurance companies handle these claims constantly, and they’ve refined a set of tactics to reduce payouts. The tactics are not complicated, but they’re effective when the person on the other end doesn’t know what to expect.
This article covers five of the most common tactics and what you can do about each one. If an adjuster has already contacted you and you’re not sure how to respond, skip to the last section.
Denying liability
The insurer says their driver wasn’t at fault. They’ll point to you, the road conditions, a third-party driver, or some combination. Sometimes they’ll flatly deny the accident happened the way you described it. Without evidence to prove the driver’s negligence, claims worth tens of thousands get settled for a fraction or denied entirely.
Your counter is documentation. What carries the most weight:
- Police report, especially one with a citation against the driver
- Photos from the scene: vehicle positions, skid marks, traffic signals, road conditions
- Eyewitness statements that corroborate your account
- Traffic or security camera footage (often overwritten within 48–72 hours; request it immediately)
If there’s a nearby business with cameras pointed at the road, ask them to save the footage or have your attorney send a preservation request before it’s overwritten.
Watch for the slow denial
One pattern to watch for: the insurer won’t always say “our driver wasn’t at fault” outright. Instead, they’ll stall on the liability determination for weeks, hoping you get frustrated and give up. If weeks pass without a clear answer, that’s not indecision. That’s a tactic.
Downplaying your injuries
When the insurer can’t deny fault, they target the severity of your injuries. The argument usually takes one of two forms: your injuries are pre-existing (“you already had back problems before this”) or they’re minor (“you left the ER the same day, so it couldn’t have been that serious”).
If the insurer successfully argues your injuries are mild or unrelated to the accident, your total payout drops. In serious cases, this tactic can cut the claim value in half, because pain and suffering damages are tied to injury severity.
Close the gap before they find it
What they’re looking for is a gap. If you waited three days before seeing a doctor, they’ll argue the injury isn’t accident-related. That argument sounds weak, but it lands with juries more often than you’d expect. A medical record from the day of the accident ties your injuries to the collision and closes that gap before it opens.
If you’ve already been diagnosed, keep your treatment continuous. A two-week break in physical therapy is enough for an adjuster to argue your injuries aren’t as serious as claimed. The reason for the gap doesn’t matter to them. The gap itself is all they use.
Rushing a settlement
The insurance company calls with an offer, sometimes within days of the accident. The number might sound reasonable. You’re stressed, bills are arriving, and making this go away feels appealing.
Why early offers are low
Early offers are calculated before the full scope of your injuries is known. The insurer is betting your total costs will far exceed what they’re putting on the table, and they want you to sign before that becomes clear.
Once you sign a settlement release, you cannot reopen the claim. If you need surgery six months later, or if chronic pain develops that keeps you from working, the release covers the insurer completely. You absorb the cost.
The numbers make this concrete: if your current medical bills are $15,000 but you end up needing surgery that costs $80,000, plus months of lost wages, a $25,000 offer from week one leaves you tens of thousands short.
When to accept
Don’t accept any offer until your doctor confirms you’ve reached maximum medical improvement (MMI), the point where your condition has stabilized.
Dragging their feet
The opposite approach: the insurer stalls. Repeated document requests, weeks without callbacks, “still under review” emails that go nowhere. The goal is to wear you down until you accept a lowball offer or stop pursuing the claim.
Every month of delay works in the insurer’s favor. Your financial pressure increases, evidence degrades, and you become more likely to accept less. In states with shorter statutes of limitations (Louisiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee allow just one year), a prolonged delay can eat into your filing window without you realizing it.
This tactic works best against people without an attorney. There’s nobody imposing deadlines, nobody who can credibly threaten to file suit. An attorney changes that. Insurers would rather negotiate than end up in a courtroom.
Exploiting recorded statements
The other driver’s insurance company may call and ask you to give a recorded statement. They’ll frame it casually: “We just want to hear your side of what happened.” The purpose of a recorded statement is to find material that weakens your claim.
The adjuster is trained to ask questions that sound harmless but are designed to reduce your payout. “You’re feeling better now, right?” goes in the file as evidence your injuries aren’t serious. “Would you say you had a clear view of the intersection?” sets up a negligence argument that shifts fault to you. “You weren’t wearing a helmet, were you?” plants a seed of shared blame. Even “Can you walk me through exactly what happened?” is designed to surface inconsistencies they can use later.
You are not legally required to give a recorded statement to the other driver’s insurer. If you have an attorney, let them handle it. If you don’t have one yet, “I’m not ready to discuss this” is enough. Saying nothing costs you nothing.
How all five tactics connect: comparative negligence
Every tactic described above feeds into one larger strategy: increasing your share of fault so the insurer pays less. Denying liability, minimizing injuries, rushing settlements, dragging out the process, and mining recorded statements all serve the same goal — shaping the narrative of responsibility.
These tactics aren’t random. They’re designed to influence how fault and damages are framed at every stage of the bicycle accident claim process, long before anything ever reaches a courtroom.
How fault percentages work
Most U.S. states use comparative negligence rules, which reduce your compensation by your share of fault. If your damages total $100,000 and you’re assigned 40% fault, you recover $60,000.
Two systems exist. In pure comparative negligence states (California, New York, Florida), you can recover damages at any fault level, even 99%. In modified comparative negligence states (Texas, Ohio, Illinois, and most others), crossing the 50–51% fault threshold eliminates your claim entirely. So in modified states, the insurer has a direct incentive to push your fault above that line.
Fault arguments they use against cyclists
The fault arguments insurers use against cyclists are predictable:
- Not wearing a helmet (not a traffic violation in most states)
- Riding without lights
- Failing to signal before turning
- Riding against traffic
Some of these are real traffic violations. Others are inflated. Not wearing a helmet doesn’t change whether the driver ran a red light, but it shifts the conversation toward what you did wrong. An experienced attorney knows which fault arguments hold up under your state’s law and which ones are padding.
Fault percentages are not set by formula. In settlement negotiations, they’re whatever the two sides agree to. In court, a jury decides. The insurer’s opening position on your fault is almost always higher than the evidence supports.
What to do next
If you’ve been in a bicycle accident and the insurance company has already reached out, talk to a bicycle accident attorney before responding to the adjuster. Most work on contingency, meaning no upfront cost. Their fee comes from your settlement or verdict.
Don’t give a recorded statement, don’t sign a settlement release, and don’t discuss the accident with the other driver’s insurer until you have legal representation. Every tactic described above is less effective once an attorney is involved.
