The clocks in an appraisal

An appraisal has a rhythm to it, and most of that rhythm is nowhere in the policy. The parts that are in the policy are the deadlines, and those are the parts that seem to get forgotten most often, mainly because nothing actually happens on the day one of them passes. No alarm goes off anywhere. The file just sits there getting older while everybody involved assumes somebody else is the one being waited on.

There are two clocks that I think are worth writing down somewhere you will actually see them.

Read the clause before you trust anything written about it

Including this.

Appraisal deadlines come out of the policy language, and that language is not uniform from one carrier to the next. The form that gets cited most often gives the carrier twenty days from the demand to name its appraiser, and then gives the two appraisers fifteen days to agree on an umpire, with the courts available to appoint one if they cannot get there on their own. Those numbers show up in a great many policies and in most of the write-ups you will find online.

They are not universal, though. Carriers write their own forms, states impose their own requirements on top, and the clause sitting in front of you governs regardless of what anyone on the internet says is typical. Read it on the file you are working, and if the numbers are different, then the numbers on your file are the real ones.

Everything below assumes the common form, and honestly the habit matters a good deal more than the particular count of days.

The first clock: the carrier names its appraiser

This one starts running when the demand is served, and it is mostly the carrier's problem right up until it slips, at which point it becomes yours, because a file with no appraiser on the other side is a file that cannot go anywhere.

The failure here is hardly ever a refusal. Usually it is a demand that went to an address nobody checks any more, or an adjuster who has moved on, or a letter sitting in somebody's queue behind a hundred others. Which is why a note at around day fourteen is worth a great deal more than a note on day twenty-one — before the deadline it reads as a helpful reminder, and afterward it reads as a complaint.

If the day does pass with nothing coming back, what you want is the paper trail: when the demand went out, how it went, and who it went to. That record is what supports whatever you decide to do next, and it is far easier to keep as you go along than it is to reconstruct three months later.

The second clock: the appraisers agree on an umpire

This one is a negotiation with a deadline attached to it, and it has a very particular way of going wrong. Both appraisers are perfectly willing, each of them puts forward names, and the fifteen days quietly run out while everyone is being courteous about it.

Two habits seem to help.

The first is to propose early and propose several. Three acceptable names on day two is a much better opening than one name on day twelve, because it signals that you are not trying to install a particular favorite, and it leaves both of you somewhere to converge.

The second is to say out loud when the clock is getting close. Something like "we are at day eleven, so should we agree on one of these or go the court route?" is not an aggressive thing to send. It is usually the thing that keeps a file from drifting into an application that neither side wanted.

If the time does run out, the fallback under the common form is a judicial appointment, and while that is not a disaster it costs time and money that agreeing on day nine would not have cost anybody.

The clocks the policy never mentions

The two above are the ones with legal weight behind them. They are not, however, the ones that really determine how long a file takes.

• Demand signed to demand submitted, which is entirely within your own control and is frequently the longest unexplained gap anywhere on the file.
• Umpire appointed to inspection scheduled, which is three calendars and a property.
• Inspection through to award, which is where a file tends to go quiet if nobody is keeping an eye on it.

None of those has a deadline attached, and that is exactly why they slip. A file that misses a policy deadline gets attention from everybody. A file that takes five weeks to get an inspection on the calendar just looks like a normal file.

Put them where you will see them

The practical point of all this is that the two policy clocks are short, they run at the same time as everything else you have going on, and they start on a date that is genuinely easy to lose track of once you have several files moving at once.

They are not difficult to manage. They are only difficult to remember, and the difference between an appraiser who hits them and one who does not is almost never a question of diligence — it is whether those dates are sitting somewhere that puts them in front of you before they matter, instead of in a folder you go and open when you are already thinking about that file anyway.

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We built The Claim King to track the appraisal timeline on each file and to raise a task when a date has not been filled in, so a carrier appraiser still unnamed at day eighteen of twenty comes and finds you. You can see what it does without scheduling a sales demo.