You’re not required to say what you think they want to hear. That one sentence would save more Las Vegas injury claims than any other advice we could give, because the damage in most cases is done in the first phone call, before a lawyer, a doctor or a police report is anywhere in the picture.
The person who picks up your insurer’s claims line the afternoon after a crash on I-15 is trained to be warm, and warm works. People apologize. They guess. They minimize. They say they are fine because that is what you say to a stranger who asks how you are. Your policy asks none of that from you. It asks for notice and for cooperation, and both of those are narrower than the adjuster’s questions make them sound.
Why You Usually Do Have to Make the Call
This is not an article telling you to hide from your own insurance company. Almost every Nevada auto policy requires you to report a crash promptly, and an insured who sits on a claim for weeks hands the insurer an argument it did not have before. Report it.
There is a second reason. Your own policy may be the one that pays. Under NRS 690B.020, no auto liability policy may be delivered or issued in Nevada unless it includes coverage for the people insured under it who are legally entitled to recover damages for bodily injury from the owner or driver of an uninsured or hit-and-run vehicle. A named insured can reject that coverage, but only in writing, on a form the insurer supplies that describes what is being rejected. Between the uninsured drivers on Boulder Highway and the hit-and-runs on Tropicana at two in the morning, that coverage gets used here.
The same statute ties hit-and-run coverage, where the other driver is unknown, to two things. There has to have been physical contact with you or the car you were in, and the crash has to have been reported to the police within the time the law requires. It also says a vehicle involved in an injury crash is presumed uninsured if no evidence of financial responsibility, meaning proof of insurance, reaches the DMV in the way the law requires within 60 days. Both of those turn on paperwork you cannot create later. So the first call has to happen. What goes into it is the whole question.
What the Duty to Cooperate Actually Covers
Open your policy and find the section headed something like “your duties after an accident or loss.” That clause is the entire basis for what the insurer can ask of you. It is short. Read it before you speak to anyone.
In most Nevada policies it requires you to notify the insurer promptly, to send along any letters, claim forms or court papers you receive, to provide the documents the insurer reasonably needs, to submit to a medical examination if the policy calls for one, and to answer questions truthfully. Some policies add a statement or an examination under oath as part of cooperation, particularly on an uninsured motorist claim.
Here is what the clause does not say. It does not require you to diagnose your own injuries. It does not require you to assign fault, estimate your speed, or explain what you were looking at. It does not require you to give a recorded statement the same day, from memory, before you have read the police report or been seen by a doctor. And it never requires you to speak to the other driver’s insurer at all, because you have no contract with them.
Truthfully is not the same as completely, right now, on a recording. You can satisfy every word of your policy with a sentence like this. “I am reporting the crash. I will give you the details as they are confirmed.”
What an Adjuster Does with an Early Statement
Your adjuster is not your enemy, but their file is not your file. Everything you say is typed into claim notes, coded, and compared months later against the police report, the other driver’s account and your own medical records. If it is recorded, it is transcribed.
Your insurer also has its own money on the line, and that shapes the questions. NRS 690B.020 says that when an insurer pays under uninsured vehicle coverage, it is entitled, subject to the terms of the coverage and to the extent of that payment, to the proceeds of any settlement or recovery from the person legally responsible for the injury. Your adjuster wants fault pinned down early because the company intends to collect from whoever caused the crash. That is a legitimate goal, and it is not the same as your goal.
Nevada reduces what you recover by your own percentage of fault, and bars recovery entirely if your share is greater than everyone else’s combined. So each casual sentence has a price. “I think I was doing about 40” becomes a speed admission on a road posted at 35. “I didn’t see him” becomes inattention. “I’m fine” becomes a note that no injury was claimed at first report, which the other side will read aloud when you claim one.
Those notes do not stay inside your insurer. Carriers exchange information when they sort out who pays whom, and if your case ends up in Nevada’s court-annexed arbitration program for smaller injury cases, the recording made on day one is an exhibit on day three hundred.
The Injury Guess Is the Most Expensive Sentence
Adrenaline is a painkiller. People walk away from crashes at Sahara and Decatur, refuse the ambulance, drive home, and wake up the next morning unable to turn their head. Concussions, whiplash, disc injuries and internal bleeding routinely take a day or three to announce themselves, and some of the injuries that become catastrophic injury cases looked like a stiff neck on day one.
When you tell an adjuster you are fine, you are not being brave. You are making a medical finding you are not qualified to make, and the insurer will treat it as one. Later, when an MRI shows a herniated disc, the file already says the insured reported no injury. That gap becomes the argument that the injury came from somewhere else.
The honest answer on day one is that you have not been evaluated yet. Say exactly that. “I have not been checked by a doctor. I will report any injuries once I have been seen.” Then go and be seen, whether that is University Medical Center, an urgent care on the way home, or your own doctor the next morning. The visit creates the record the file will otherwise lack.
What the First Call Should Contain
Facts that exist on paper and can be checked. Nothing that lives only in your head. A good first report sounds almost boring, and that is the point.
- The date and time of the crash.
- The location, as precisely as you can give it. The intersection, the direction you were traveling, the lane, or the mile marker on US-95 or the 215.
- The vehicles involved, with year, make, model and plate numbers as written on the exchange of information.
- The other driver’s name and insurance company, again as written, not as remembered.
- Which agency responded, whether that was Metro, Nevada Highway Patrol, Henderson or North Las Vegas police, and the report or event number the officer gave you.
- Whether your vehicle was towed, and to which yard.
- Whether anyone left the scene by ambulance. That is a fact, not a diagnosis.
- Your claim number, the adjuster’s name and their direct line, written down before you hang up.
Everything else waits. Who was at fault. How fast anyone was going. What you were doing in the seconds before impact. Whether you were on the phone. What the other driver said to you afterward. How you feel. Any apology, to anyone, for anything. None of that is a fact you are required to supply on a first report, and every item on that list has cost someone a claim.
If the adjuster pushes, you do not have to argue. “I’d rather wait for the police report before I speak to that” is a complete answer.
The Recorded Statement Can Wait
At some point in the first call, or the follow-up a day later, you will hear a friendly “do you mind if I record this?” You can say no for now. Declining to be recorded on the day of the crash is not a refusal to cooperate. It is a question of timing, and the timing is yours.
Give the statement when the police report is in your hand, when a doctor has examined you, and when you have read your own policy’s cooperation clause. If you have a lawyer by then, the lawyer is on the line. If your policy genuinely requires a statement or an examination under oath, you give it, prepared and accurate, rather than improvised.
The other driver’s insurer will call too, usually within a few days. You owe that company nothing. Not a statement, not a recording, not a description of your injuries, not a signature on a medical release. Take their claim number and end the call.
The other side can already be far ahead of you. If a commercial truck was involved, the carrier’s investigators may have photographed the scene before your car was on the tow truck. We have written separately about trucking company rapid response teams at Nevada crash scenes, and the short version is that the professionals on the other side never give a statement on day one. Neither should you.
When Your Own Insurer Handles the Claim Unfairly
Reporting carefully protects you from your own words. It does not protect you from an insurer that drags its feet, and Nevada law has something to say about that.
NRS 686A.310 lists the things an insurer may not do in settling claims. Among them, the statute names misrepresenting pertinent facts or policy provisions relating to the coverage at issue, failing to acknowledge and act reasonably promptly on communications about a claim, failing to adopt reasonable standards for the prompt investigation and processing of claims, failing to affirm or deny coverage within a reasonable time after proof of loss has been submitted, and failing to effectuate a prompt, fair and equitable settlement once the insurer’s liability has become reasonably clear.
The list continues. Failing to promptly give the insured a reasonable explanation of the basis in the policy for a denial or for an offer to settle the claim. Advising an insured or claimant not to seek legal counsel. Misleading an insured or claimant about the statute of limitations. If an adjuster tells you that you do not need a lawyer, that is not friendly advice. It is on the statute’s list.
The section then says an insurer is liable to its insured for any damages the insured sustains as a result of those practices, in addition to whatever remedies the Commissioner has. That second part matters. The Nevada Division of Insurance is the state agency that licenses and regulates insurers doing business here, and it accepts consumer complaints about how a claim was handled. A complaint to the Division is not a lawsuit and does not replace one, but it puts a regulator’s file next to the insurer’s file, and insurers answer regulators differently than they answer policyholders.
Keep everything. Every letter, every email, every claim note you are sent, and a written log of each call with the date, the adjuster’s name and what was said. An unfair claims practice is proved from the record, and you build that record from day one.
How We Handle the Insurance Calls
When you bring us a crash case, the insurance calls stop coming to you. We send a letter of representation to every carrier involved, we obtain the police report from Metro or the Highway Patrol, and we schedule any statement your own policy actually requires for a date when the facts are established and we are on the line with you. The other driver’s insurer speaks to us, not to you.
We read your policy so we know what cooperation means in your contract rather than in an adjuster’s opinion of it, and we track how each carrier handles the claim against the standards in NRS 686A.310 from the first letter onward. Every case turns on its own facts. Our job is to make sure the record shows what actually happened, not what you said before you knew.
If you have already made the first call and said more than you meant to, that is not the end of the claim. It is a reason to stop talking now. You can reach us through our contact page and tell us what has been said so far, and we will take it from there.
1-800-870-8910