Getting paid on umpire work

Most of what gets written about the appraisal process seems to stop at the award. The umpire signs, the amount of loss is set, and the article ends there. What I have not seen much of is anything covering the part that comes after, which is getting paid, and umpire work has a way of getting paid that tends to catch people out the first few times they run into it.

The short version is that your fee is not one debt; it is two, owed by two parties who behave very differently from one another, and in my experience the most common reason an umpire is still chasing money three months later is that the whole thing was invoiced as though it were one.

Two halves, two different people who owe you

In most appraisal clauses each side pays for its own appraiser, and the two sides split the cost of the umpire equally between them. That is the arrangement I have seen almost everywhere, though the clause is what governs and it is always worth reading the actual policy language rather than assuming, because some carriers write it differently and a few states add their own requirements on top.

What the split means in practice is that half of your fee is owed by the insured and half of it is owed by the carrier, and those two halves are not the same kind of debt at all.

The carrier half will usually arrive. It generally travels through the carrier's appraiser and into a process that exists to pay invoices, so it may be slow, but it is rarely in any real doubt.

The insured half is the one that tends to go quiet. The homeowner has just been through a dispute, has often already paid a public adjuster or their own appraiser along the way, and does not always understand that the umpire is a cost the two sides share. By the time your invoice reaches them the award has landed, the claim feels finished, and their attention has moved on to whatever comes next.

So if you send one invoice for the whole fee to one party and expect them to figure out the rest, what you have really done is hand your collections problem to somebody who has no particular reason to solve it for you.

Agree the fee in writing before you accept

This is the advice that every certification body I am aware of gives, and it is also the one most easily skipped when the appointment comes in over the phone and you are trying to be helpful.

Before you accept, put the fee arrangement in writing to both appraisers — your rate, what it covers, whether there is a retainer, how you handle travel and inspection time, and plainly that the fee is split equally between the parties. Send it to both sides at the same time rather than one and then the other.

The reason is not that anyone involved is dishonest. It is that an umpire who raises the subject of money after the award has been signed can look like an umpire whose fee might have depended on the outcome, and the entire value of the appointment rests on the fact that it did not. Settle it before you have looked at a single document and the question never comes up at all.

Send two invoices, not one

Two invoices, each one for half, each addressed to the party that actually owes it.

This sounds fussy, and it is still the single change that has cut down the chasing more than anything else I have tried. One invoice for the full amount forces whoever opens it to figure out what portion is theirs and who is supposed to cover the rest, and that is friction at exactly the moment you would rather there were none. Two invoices for the right amounts can each simply be paid, which is all you are really asking for.

It also gives you something you can look at. A half that has not arrived shows up as an obvious gap in a list, whereas half of a single invoice is a conversation you have to remember to go and have.

The two halves will age differently

Once you are invoicing them separately the pattern becomes fairly easy to see: the carrier half lands on a reasonably predictable cycle, and the insured half either arrives quickly or does not arrive at all.

That difference ought to change how you chase each one. The carrier half rarely needs anything except time, and chasing it early mostly just irritates an adjuster who was always going to pay you. The insured half is the one worth following up on, and following up works far better early, while the award is still recent and the relationship still feels warm.

A rule I have found useful is to leave the carrier half alone until it is genuinely late, and to put a reminder on the insured half at somewhere around two or three weeks.

When one half does not show up

When it comes to it, escalate through the appraiser who appointed you rather than going to the party directly.

The insured's appraiser has a working relationship with their client and a professional interest in seeing the process finish cleanly, so a note to them is usually more effective than a third invoice to a homeowner who has stopped opening your email. It also keeps you out of a direct argument about money with one of the parties, which is a position an umpire ought to want to avoid even after the award has been signed.

If it does go further than that, the thing that protects you is the paper you created at the very beginning — the written fee agreement, sent to both sides, before you ever accepted the appointment.

Keep both halves somewhere you can see them

None of this is complicated. It is only easy to lose track of, because a split fee does not really fit the shape of ordinary invoicing, where there is one job and one invoice and it is either paid or it is not. A half-paid fee is none of those things, and a system that can only tell you "outstanding" will slowly stop being much use to you.

However you keep track of your work, the thing worth being able to see at a glance is which half of which fee is still owed and how long it has been sitting there. That is a small piece of bookkeeping, and it tends to pay for itself the first time a file would otherwise have gone quiet for a quarter.

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