It’s your claim. Not just theirs to close. Hold onto that the day your own insurance company calls to say it has “worked something out” after a crash on the 215 or a pile-up in the Spaghetti Bowl.
Your insurer has real authority over parts of your file. It also has a habit of talking as if that authority covers everything. It does not. Some settlements your carrier can reach on its own. Others need your signature, and until you give it, nothing is closed.
So can you reject a settlement offer from insurance in Nevada? On the claims that belong to you, yes. Here is how to tell those claims apart, what a release does once you sign it, and what your insurer must do while you decide.
What Your Own Insurer Can Settle Without You
Your vehicle damage. If you carry collision coverage and use it, your insurer pays to repair or total your car, less your deductible. That is a contract between you and the company. You can dispute the valuation, but you are not negotiating with the other driver.
Subrogation with the other driver’s carrier. Once your insurer has paid your property damage or your medical payments coverage, it can pursue the at-fault driver’s insurer for reimbursement. The two companies argue fault between themselves, often in inter-company arbitration. You are rarely consulted and do not need to be, though any deductible your carrier recovers belongs to you.
The other driver’s claim against you. If the other driver says you caused the crash, your liability coverage handles it, and the policy lets your insurer settle that claim with or without your agreement.
Those three are the insurer’s to run. What follows is not.
What Your Insurer Cannot Close Without You
Your bodily injury claim against the at-fault driver. This claim belongs to you. The other driver’s insurer pays it, and only you can release it. Your own adjuster may pass along an offer and encourage you to take it. Until you sign a release, the claim is open.
Your uninsured and underinsured motorist claim. This is a first-party claim, meaning you make it against your own policy. Under NRS 690B.020, no auto liability policy may be delivered or issued for delivery in Nevada unless it includes coverage for the people insured under it who are legally entitled to recover for bodily injury, sickness, disease or death caused by the owner or operator of an uninsured or hit-and-run vehicle. The statute allows two exceptions, a policy issued to the State or a political subdivision, and a named insured who rejected the coverage in writing on a form the insurer furnished. Underinsured motorist coverage, the part that applies when the at-fault driver has some insurance but not enough, is offered alongside it.
When you make a UM or UIM claim, your own company evaluates your injuries the way the other side would. It can offer. It cannot decide for you. The claim closes only when you accept in writing.
The rule is simple. If the settlement is for what the insurer owes you personally for your injuries, your signature is required. If it is about reimbursement between two carriers, or about a car, the insurer can usually act alone.
What a Release Closes Forever
A release is the document that ends a claim. In exchange for the payment, you give up the right to pursue that claim again against that party. Most releases in Nevada injury cases are broad. They cover known and unknown injuries, claims you have made and claims you could have made, and they bind anyone claiming through you.
That language matters because injuries develop. A back that feels stiff in the first month can turn out to be a disc injury that needs surgery in the sixth. Once you have signed a general release of your bodily injury claim, a worsening condition does not reopen it.
Three things to check before you sign.
- Which claim is being released. A property damage release should say property damage and nothing else. If it releases “all claims” arising from the crash, it has just closed your injury claim too.
- Who is being released. A release of the at-fault driver is different from a release of your own carrier. Signing one does not close the other unless the language reaches both.
- What you know about your future care. For a serious injury, the treatment you will need in the years ahead is a central part of the claim, and no one can describe it in the first month. It is why life care plans in Nevada catastrophic injury cases are prepared before serious negotiations begin. Signing earlier closes the claim on an injury no one has finished measuring.
After a spinal cord injury, a brain injury, an amputation or severe burns, the release deserves more scrutiny than any other document in your file. Our catastrophic injury practice exists for these cases, where the release is the last document you should sign and the first one an insurer wants signed.
The Consent and Notice Clauses in Your UM and UIM Coverage
Most Nevada auto policies say, in some form, that you must notify your insurer before you settle with the at-fault driver and get its consent before you sign a release that lets that driver off the hook. The reason sits in the statute. NRS 690B.020 provides that when an insurer pays under uninsured vehicle coverage, it is entitled, to the extent of that payment and subject to the terms of the coverage, to the proceeds of any settlement or recovery from the person legally responsible for the injury.
Put plainly, your insurer expects to step into your shoes against the at-fault driver for whatever it pays you. Release that driver without telling your carrier and you have cut off that right, and many policies treat that as a breach of the underinsured coverage.
The safe sequence looks like this.
- Confirm the at-fault driver’s policy limits in writing before agreeing to anything.
- Send written notice to your own insurer that a policy-limits offer is on the table, and ask for written consent to accept.
- Give the insurer the time your policy allows to respond.
- Sign the release of the at-fault driver only once your carrier has consented or that period has passed.
Hit-and-run claims carry their own notice condition. NRS 690B.020 treats a vehicle whose owner or operator is unknown, or cannot be found after reasonable diligence, as uninsured only where the injury resulted from physical contact with you or with the vehicle you were in, and the crash was reported within the time Nevada’s crash-reporting law requires to the police department of the city where it happened, or to the county sheriff or the Nevada Highway Patrol in an unincorporated area. In practice that means Las Vegas Metro for the city and for unincorporated Clark County, including most of the Strip, the Henderson or North Las Vegas police inside those cities, and the Highway Patrol on I-15 and US 95. Report late and an unidentified driver may not count as uninsured at all.
The same section adds that a vehicle involved in an injury crash is presumed uninsured if no evidence of financial responsibility is supplied to the Nevada DMV in the required manner within 60 days after the crash. If the other driver has gone quiet, that presumption is what lets your UM claim move forward.
When Your Own Insurer Pushes a Low First-Party Number
The moment you make a UM or UIM claim, the relationship changes. Your carrier is no longer working for you. It is deciding how much it will pay on a claim you are making against it, and its first number is an opening position, not a verdict on your injuries.
You do not have to accept it, answer on the adjuster’s timeline, or justify your refusal. Do this instead.
- Ask for the basis in writing. Which medical records were reviewed, which were discounted, and which policy provisions the insurer relied on. You are entitled to a reasonable explanation, and the law says so.
- Keep treating. Gaps in care are the first thing a low offer leans on. Keep every appointment.
- Do not give a recorded statement without preparation. Cooperation under the policy does not mean a casual phone call that later becomes an exhibit.
- Do not sign a medical authorization that reaches back years. Limit it to the injuries in this claim. An open-ended authorization is how “pre-existing condition” arguments get built.
- Put every communication in writing. A short email confirming a call outlasts any memory of it.
If the number does not move, the claim does not die. Your policy describes how a disputed UM or UIM claim gets resolved, and a claim that reaches the Eighth Judicial District Court in Clark County may pass through the Nevada court-annexed arbitration program for injury cases before it ever sees a jury. Refusing a low offer is not the end of the road. It is the start of the actual negotiation.
The Rules Your Insurer Answers To
Nevada does not leave first-party claim handling to the insurer’s good nature. NRS 686A.310 lists the things an insurer may not do when handling a claim and calls each one an unfair practice. The ones that matter most on a first-party injury claim follow.
- Misrepresenting to insureds or claimants 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 effectuate a prompt, fair and equitable settlement once the insurer’s liability has become reasonably clear.
- Compelling an insured to file a lawsuit to collect what the policy owes by offering substantially less than the lawsuit later produces, when the insured’s claim was reasonably similar to that result.
- Failing to settle promptly under one portion of the policy, where liability is reasonably clear, in order to influence settlement under another portion. Holding your property damage payment hostage to your injury claim is the classic example.
- Failing to give you a prompt and reasonable explanation of the basis in the policy, in light of the facts and the applicable law, for a denial or for an offer to settle or compromise.
- Advising an insured or claimant not to seek legal counsel.
- Misleading an insured or claimant about any applicable statute of limitations.
The same section provides that, in addition to any rights or remedies available to the Commissioner, an insurer is liable to its insured for any damages the insured sustains as a result of one of these practices. That claim stands on its own, separate from the injury claim, and it is brought against the insurer rather than the driver.
The Commissioner of Insurance heads the Nevada Division of Insurance, the state agency that regulates insurers in Nevada and takes consumer complaints about claim handling. A complaint there does not replace a lawsuit, but it puts the insurer’s conduct in front of its regulator.
What Happens If You Say No
Saying no to an offer is an ordinary step in a claim, not a breach of your policy. An insurer that receives a clear, written refusal, with the medical records that support it, has a communication it must acknowledge and act on promptly. Silence gives it nothing to answer.
A few things to expect.
- The insurer may ask for an independent medical examination. Your policy probably allows it. Attend, and take notes on who examined you and for how long.
- The insurer will account for what the at-fault driver’s carrier paid. Underinsured coverage is written to sit on top of that payment, not to duplicate it.
- The clock keeps running. The time limit for suing the at-fault driver does not pause while you negotiate, and nothing an adjuster says extends it. Get any assurance about timing in writing, because misleading you about a limitations period is on the list above.
- The insurer may ask you to sign something anyway. Read every form for the release language described earlier. If it releases “all claims,” it is not partial.
How We Handle a First-Party Fight
When your own carrier is pushing a number, the first thing we do is separate the claims. Property damage gets resolved on its own track so it cannot be used as leverage. Subrogation is left to the carriers. The injury claim and the UM or UIM claim are treated as yours, with your signature as the only thing that closes them.
Then we put the insurer on paper. A written demand with the medical records attached, a request for the basis of any offer, and written notice before any release of the at-fault driver so the consent clause is satisfied. Every case turns on its own facts.
If your insurer has negotiated something it expects you to sign, or has put a first-party number in front of you that does not fit your injuries, reach us through our contact page before you sign anything. The release can wait. Your treatment cannot.
1-800-870-8910