The Trap of Greed: What to Watch For Before You Hire a Public Adjuster
A policyholder calls a public adjuster after the worst week of their year. The house has smoke damage, or three inches of water in the basement, or half a roof missing after a storm. They are scared, they are exhausted, and they are trusting a stranger to stand between them and a company that has every financial incentive to pay them as little as possible. That trust is the entire foundation of this profession. It is also the easiest thing in the world to abuse.
What Falling Into the Trap Looks Like
Greed in this line of work rarely announces itself. It shows up in smaller decisions that feel justifiable in the moment. Padding a scope with items that were never damaged, because the insurer will probably negotiate it down anyway. Talking a client out of accepting a fair number so the file stays open a little longer. Steering a client toward a contractor who pays a referral fee instead of the one who'll do the best repair. Letting a claim drag for months past what it needed, because a bigger eventual number means a bigger eventual fee, and the client doesn't know enough to ask why it's taking so long. None of this looks like theft. Every one of these choices has a version of itself that sounds reasonable if you say it out loud only to yourself.
The contingency model makes this worse, not better. When your income is a percentage of the claim, your incentives and your client's incentives are supposed to point the same direction — both of you want the largest fair recovery, as efficiently as possible. But nothing forces that alignment to hold. Left unchecked, the same fee structure that's supposed to align you with your client can just as easily reward you for working against their actual interest: a bigger number over a faster one, a longer fight over a fair resolution, a fee that reflects the size of the check rather than the size of the value you added to get it there.
The Cost Isn't Paid by the Adjuster Who Caused It
Here is the part that should bother every honest adjuster reading this: the policyholder who gets taken advantage of does not walk away thinking one adjuster was dishonest. They walk away thinking public adjusters are dishonest. They don't file a complaint against a license number — most of them don't even know how, or that they could. They tell the story at work, at church, at the next block party, to the next neighbor whose roof gets hit by the same storm. "We hired one of those public adjuster guys and it cost us more than it got us" becomes the version of events that spreads, and it spreads further and lasts longer than any good outcome ever does.
That story is a tax every honest adjuster pays on someone else's mistake. It's the client who decides to fight their claim alone rather than risk hiring "one of those guys." It's the attorney who stops referring policyholder cases to adjusters because the last one they trusted burned a client. It's the adjuster showing up to a first inspection already fighting a reputation they didn't earn. The profession only works, at a trust level, if the bad actors are rare enough that they read as the exception. Every one of them that gets away with it makes the next honest adjuster's job harder.
How to Stay on the Right Side of the Line
None of this requires heroic willpower. It requires a few concrete habits that make the trap harder to fall into without noticing.
Ask what the number would look like to an outsider. Before charging a fee, imagine explaining exactly how it was calculated to someone with no stake in the outcome — a regulator, a judge, the client's adult son. If that explanation makes you uncomfortable, the fee structure is the problem, not the explanation.
Charge for value added, not for entitlement that was already there. If an insurer had already put a number on the table before you were hired, your job is to improve on that number — and your fee should reflect the improvement, not the whole payout. Conflating the two is how a fee stops being compensation and starts being a toll.
Set the timeline expectation early, in writing, and stick to it. A claim that drags is sometimes unavoidable — insurers stall, damage is complex, documentation takes time. But a client should always know roughly why a claim is still open, and that explanation should never be "because a bigger number benefits me more than it benefits you."
Never let "the insurance company would screw them anyway" become a justification. That reasoning is how a lot of otherwise decent people talk themselves into decisions they wouldn't defend out loud. The insurer's conduct doesn't set your ethical floor. Your own does.
Build a practice that survives on reputation, not on turnover. An adjuster who needs a fresh policyholder every month who's never heard of him has no incentive to protect the relationships he's already built. An adjuster whose next ten clients come from the last ten he represented fairly has every incentive in the world to keep it that way. Referrals are what an honest practice runs on — and referrals are the first thing greed burns down.
The Standard Worth Holding
Every policyholder who hires a public adjuster is making a bet that a stranger will treat their crisis with more integrity than the institution they're fighting. Every time that bet pays off, it makes the next policyholder's decision to hire representation a little easier. Every time it doesn't, it makes the next honest adjuster's job a little harder — not because of anything that adjuster did, but because of what someone else took.
The question worth asking on every file isn't just whether a fee is legal or a contract is enforceable. It's simpler than that: is this client demonstrably better off, in real terms, for having trusted me? If the honest answer is ever no, that's the trap closing — and the only person who can walk back out of it is the adjuster standing in it.
Gabriel Antoine is a licensed Public Adjuster in New York (PA-1819103), New Jersey (3002844026), and Indiana (Certificate of Authority No. 4242786). Request a consultation.