If the driver says they "didn't see" the pedestrian, that does not kill the claim in New Hampshire.

A lot of drivers say that after they hit someone in a crosswalk, on a shoulder, or crossing near a workplace, a school, a clinic, or a parking lot entrance. It sounds powerful. It isn't magic. Sometimes it actually helps prove the driver wasn't paying enough attention.

What matters is where the pedestrian was, what the driver should have seen, and how much fault each side gets stuck with under New Hampshire's comparative fault rule.

And this is where it gets ugly fast for someone who spends the day driving between home visits in Manchester, Nashua, Dover, Rochester, or out along Route 101 and the seacoast. The insurer starts acting like walking equals recklessness. They will pick apart the crossing, the clothing, the weather, the timing, the phone records, and whether the person "darted out."

"I didn't see her" is not a defense by itself

Drivers are supposed to see what is there to be seen.

If someone is in a marked crosswalk, already well into the lane, crossing near a signal, or walking from one side of a road to the other in a place where a reasonable driver should expect foot traffic, "I didn't see her" can sound a lot like "I wasn't looking carefully enough."

That's especially true in New Hampshire in spring, when the roads are a mess. Snowbanks may be gone, but now you get glare, fog, wet pavement, potholes, dirty windshields, and that gray late-day light that makes people harder to pick up unless the driver is actually paying attention.

A crash on a local road in Concord or a commercial strip in Hillsborough County is not judged by whether the driver feels sorry afterward. It gets judged by basic negligence facts: speed, lane position, sightlines, lighting, crosswalk markings, signals, skid marks, witness accounts, and whether the pedestrian had the right of way.

The real fight is comparative fault

New Hampshire uses modified comparative fault with a 51% bar.

That means the pedestrian can still recover money if they were not more than 50% at fault. If they are 51% or more at fault, the claim is dead. If they are 20% at fault, their recovery gets cut by 20%.

That single rule is why crosswalk cases turn into trench warfare.

The insurance company does not need to prove the driver did nothing wrong. It just needs to push enough blame onto the pedestrian to shrink the payout or wipe it out entirely.

So if your worker was crossing between appointments and got hit, expect the adjuster to hammer on questions like:

• Was it a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crossing at an intersection?
• Did she start crossing with enough time?
• Was she crossing against a signal?
• Was she visible from the driver's lane?
• Did she step out from between parked cars?
• Was she distracted by her phone, clipboard, or navigation app?
• Was it dark, raining, or slushy?
• Did she have earbuds in?
• Did she suddenly change direction?

That's the game. Not because those facts always defeat the claim, but because they create percentages.

Crosswalk disputes are rarely as clean as people think

People hear "crosswalk" and assume automatic win.

Not in real life.

First, there are marked crosswalks and unmarked crosswalks at intersections. Second, plenty of crashes happen in ugly in-between spots: driveway mouths, parking lot exits, bus stop areas, multi-lane roads near clinics or apartment complexes, or places where everybody crosses even though the paint is worn to hell.

The driver's insurer will try to turn every ambiguous crossing into "jaywalking," even when the pedestrian was crossing in a pretty normal, foreseeable place.

That matters in New Hampshire because a lot of daily travel happens on roads that were built for moving cars, not for people getting out and walking safely. Think stretches of Route 16, parts of US-4, busy commercial roads in Nashua and Manchester, or the short but congested chaos around the seacoast and I-95 connectors. A social worker parking, checking an address, and crossing to an apartment building is doing something completely ordinary. The carrier may still frame it like she wandered into traffic for no reason.

If she was working between home visits, there may be two insurance fights, not one

This is the part agencies love to blur.

If she was driving her own car between client locations and then got out and was hit as a pedestrian, the agency may say its insurance does not cover her "commute between sites." That wording can be misleading as hell.

A true commute from home to the first assignment is one thing. Travel between work locations during the workday is another.

That can affect whether workers' compensation should be in the picture through New Hampshire's labor system, separate from the driver's liability insurance claim. It can also affect wage loss arguments, medical bill handling, and who starts pointing fingers at whom.

And yes, the auto insurer for the driver who hit her may still try to use the employment issue as a distraction, as if confusion over job coverage somehow changes who had the duty to yield in the roadway. It doesn't.

Anti-pedestrian bias is real, and adjusters count on it

There's a quiet bias in these cases. People assume the person on foot must have been careless. Same thing riders deal with in motorcycle cases when the driver says, "I just didn't see him." The subtext is always the same: the vulnerable road user came out of nowhere.

No. Usually they didn't.

Usually somebody looked too late, turned too fast, rolled through a crosswalk, rushed a left turn, or treated a neighborhood street like a merge lane.

In a pedestrian case, the insurer may also lean on class-coded nonsense. If the injured person was carrying bags, walking in work shoes, crossing near subsidized housing, moving between appointments, or in a part of town adjusters think jurors won't identify with, they start building a story about bad judgment instead of a story about driver negligence.

That is not abstract. It affects claim value.

A pedestrian with strong visible injuries but disputed fault often gets less pressure-free negotiating room than people expect, especially if the insurer thinks a jury in Rockingham or Hillsborough County might split blame.

The claim amount can swing wildly on tiny facts

Not because the law is mysterious. Because juries and insurers react to specifics.

A marked crosswalk with a walk signal is very different from crossing mid-block at dusk on a wet road.

A driver turning right on red near downtown Portsmouth is very different from a pedestrian stepping from behind an SUV on a multilane arterial in Nashua.

A clean line of sight is very different from a blind crest, glare, heavy rain, or a delivery van blocking the lane view.

If the driver says "I didn't see her," the next question is simple: why not?

If the answer is speed, distraction, windshield glare, failure to yield while turning, or blowing through a crosswalk, that sentence can increase the value of the claim instead of reducing it.

If the answer is that the pedestrian crossed outside a safe spot, against traffic control, from an obstructed position, or without giving drivers time to react, then the damages may get cut hard under comparative fault.

That's why these cases are won or lost on scene details, not on that one canned line from the driver. "I didn't see her" is just the opening excuse. The real question is whether New Hampshire law sees that excuse as proof of reasonable driving, or proof the driver missed what they were supposed to notice.