Eighteen years of adjusting, pointed the other way

Since 2008 this firm has adjusted claims on assignment from insurance companies. That is a specific education. You learn how a reserve is set, how a scope is built and where it gets trimmed, which documents move a file and which are noted and shelved, and what a claim needs to look like before a company will pay it without argument.

Very little of that knowledge is written down anywhere a policyholder can reach. It is the practical grammar of how claims are settled, and it is held almost entirely by people who work for insurers.

We opened the public adjusting practice to put it on the other side of the table.

The separation, stated plainly

We think you should hear this from us rather than discover it. Golden Shield Adjusters Ltd. does two distinct kinds of work:

The two lines do not meet. Our insurer assignments are automobile; our public adjusting work is property. We will not act for an insurer on any matter in which we act for you, and we will tell you at the outset if any connection to your insurer exists.

Licensing

Public adjusting in British Columbia is a licensed activity regulated by the Insurance Council of British Columbia. Our adjusters hold current Insurance Council licences, and we will provide licence details on request.

This record is public. You can confirm it, and check any adjuster's standing, on the Insurance Council of British Columbia licensee list — and we would encourage you to, for us or for anyone else asking to handle your claim.

Scale, and what that means for you

The public adjusting practice is deliberately small — one to two adjusters carrying files at any time. That has a real consequence worth being straight about: we are selective, and our first response to a written enquiry generally takes a few business days rather than an hour.

What you get in exchange is that the person who reads your policy is the person who documents your loss and the person who negotiates it. Your file is not passed down a chain. If a loss is actively in progress, call — we answer after hours for those.

Languages

We work in English, Punjabi and Hindi. This matters more than it may sound. The details that carry a claim — how the water travelled, what was in the room, what the contractor said on the phone — are exactly the details people leave out when they are describing a disaster in a second language.