Public adjusting is under attack again. This is one of my strongest perceptions coming away from the NAPIA Annual Meeting. The attack is not new. Those of us who have been around long enough have seen this movie before. After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, there were efforts in Florida to restrict or even eliminate public adjusting. Similar efforts have appeared in different forms over the decades. Today, the attacks are more sophisticated, better funded, and often framed in the language of “consumer protection,” while the practical effect is to leave policyholders without meaningful professional help after a loss.
The answer from the public adjusting profession cannot simply be lobbying, complaining, or defending yesterday’s conduct. The answer must be mastery.
That was the central theme of my speech at NAPIA last week. Mastery is not a marketing slogan. It is doing the right thing, the right way, over and over again until professional excellence becomes second nature. Mastery requires discipline, teamwork, and resources. Those three things are often the difference between being vulnerable and being untouchable.
While at NAPIA, I had the opportunity to meet with Jeff Major, who has been working on a proposed Public Adjuster Code of Ethics with much more substance than what is commonly found in most existing standards. Attorneys Stephanie Thompson and Austin Meyers from my firm have been helping with that effort. The draft is being privately circulated, and I hope it will receive broader public circulation very soon.
Outgoing NAPIA President Justin Skipton followed through on a promise he made. He has been working on proposed licensing changes that incorporate higher standards and requirements for those who seek to become and remain licensed public adjusters. I have read it and understand that this proposal may also be circulated soon.
Jeff Major and Justin Skipton deserve applause. They are not just talking about professionalism. They are putting standards in writing. Written standards can be debated, improved, adopted, taught, and enforced. They also send a message to regulators, legislators, courts, insurers, and the public that serious public adjusters are willing to demand more of themselves.
The insurance industry has its own problems with standards. Indeed, much of the insurance industry appears to be in a cost-cutting mode. Many carriers are reducing the role of field adjusters. I have noted this in many of my blog posts, including Meet the New Low-Cost Independent Field Adjuster. Some claims are handled with little or no meaningful inspection by a qualified company adjuster. Instead, ladder assist firms, preferred vendors, desk adjusters, software platforms, and other third parties increasingly perform work that used to be done by trained, dedicated insurance adjusters with much more field-level monetary authority to promptly pay policyholder customers. Those days are gone for most carriers.
There is even insurance industry literature discussing a future in which insurance claims become more of a self-service product. Policyholders will submit photographs or videos. Artificial intelligence will evaluate the damage. Preferred vendors will accept the estimate and perform the work. The human insurance adjuster may become more remote from the loss, the policyholder, and the actual damage.
This future should concern every policyholder. Insurance is not supposed to be a self-checkout lane after a catastrophe. A burned home, a hurricane-damaged business, or a family displaced by water damage is not the same thing as buying groceries and scanning barcodes. Claims require human judgment, listening, and empathy. They require knowledge of construction, policy language, causation, pricing, matching, code upgrades, business interruption, and the real-world effect of delay.
This is precisely why public adjusters are becoming more important, not less. If insurers continue moving toward automation, outsourcing, and cost containment, public adjusters may become the only human professionals standing beside policyholders at the loss site, carefully evaluating damage and explaining what is truly owed. The role carries tremendous responsibility and demands higher standards than what exist today.
Public adjusters cannot credibly complain about insurer shortcuts while tolerating shortcuts within their own profession. They cannot criticize insurer undertraining while resisting serious education and licensing standards. They cannot demand respect from regulators while failing to embrace a code of conduct that has teeth.
The public adjusting profession needs to raise the bar before others lower the boom.
This is why the work being done by Jeff Major, Justin Skipton, and others at NAPIA is so important. A stronger code of ethics and stronger licensing standards are not threats to good public adjusters. They are protection. They help distinguish professionals from pretenders. They help regulators identify who is serious and who is not. They help policyholders understand why a qualified public adjuster can make all the difference after a loss.
At NAPIA, I sensed that its new President, Tim Woodard, and the incoming leadership understand this challenge. The newly elected leadership appears ready to meet the moment. They recognize that the insurance lobby often views public adjusters as a cost because public adjusters help policyholders obtain benefits that should have been paid in the first place. They also recognize that public adjusters must be the professional voice for policyholders, not merely a trade group defending fees.
There is a big difference between defending a business model and defending a profession. A business model asks, “How do we protect our income?” A profession asks, “How do we better serve the people who depend on us?”
The public adjusting profession must choose the second question. The income will follow the trust.
Mastery begins with discipline. Public adjusters must study policy language, construction, estimating, causation, ethics, negotiation, documentation, and the claims regulations in the states where they practice daily. They must do this continuously and prove that they are keeping up. A license should not be the finish line, but the starting line.
Mastery also requires teamwork. The best public adjusters do not pretend to know everything. They work with engineers, accountants, building consultants, lawyers, contractors, inventory specialists, and other public adjusters when the claim requires it. They know that large and complex losses are not won by ego. They are won by coordinated professional effort.
Mastery requires resources. This includes better technology, better claim management systems, better training, and yes, careful use of artificial intelligence. But resources are only valuable when professionals know how to use them properly. AI will not make an untrained adjuster wise. It may only help that adjuster make mistakes faster. In the hands of a master, however, technology can improve speed, consistency, and quality.
Public adjusters should not fear higher standards. They should demand them. The people who should fear higher standards are those who want the title of public adjuster without doing or knowing how to do the work, the fee without the responsibility, and the license without the calling.
The insurance industry can attack public adjuster fees. It can support legislation restricting public adjusting. It can promote narratives suggesting public adjusters are unnecessary or harmful. But it cannot outlaw excellence. It cannot defeat a profession committed to mastery.
This is the time for the public adjusting profession to stand up for what it is about. It needs to tether in, train harder, build better teams, use better tools, write better estimates, document better files, and communicate clearly and more professionally. Public adjusters should treat ethics as a competitive advantage and become so good that the work itself becomes the answer to the critics.
Policyholders need public adjusters because insurance claims are becoming more impersonal, more automated, and too often more adversarial. The more insurers remove trained human judgment from the claim process, the more important public adjusters become. The importance must be earned.
Mastery is the path. Higher ethics and stronger licensing standards are part of that path. NAPIA’s leadership seems to understand that, and others should now join that effort, improve it, support it, and help make the public adjusting profession stronger.
The future belongs to public adjusters who choose mastery over mediocrity. Demanding mastery is the answer to a future where public adjusters will be allowed to positively transform the lives of families and businesses.
Thought For The Day
“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution.”
— Aristotle