I did end up negotiating a buyback without the help of a lawyer, but understand GM will draw it out for months and tell you forever and ever that none of the terms are negotiable and the law is what it is. n
My experience of the buyback process without a lawyer is this:
1.) Fairly quickly after you file a lemon claim with your state's attorney general or the BBB (I did both), and after they have taken longer than the allowed amount of time to repair your under-warranty car (30-45 days in most states, no need for multiple attempts), GM presents an unreasonable buyback offer.
2.) The unreasonable buyback offer uses a 100K useful life assumption to determine how much to deduct from the buyback offer for usage. Useful life should at a minimum be 200K miles in my opinion and I eventually negotiated 240K miles useful life based on my two previous (2009) GM V8 vehicles I owned as evidence. Some states' lemon law guidance also has unreasonably low useful life guidance in their lemon law formulas. Texas was 125K miles and in Louisiana (where I live), the statute just states "a reasonable" usage deduction. No matter what your state's lemon law guidance says, this usage deduction should be negotiable so it is reasonable. Nobody buys a car expecting a 100K or 125K useful life.
3.) You then spend months and months of back and fourth, all the while GM reps telling you in no circumstance will any of this be negotiable, that your states lemon statutes define in concrete what is offered, and in no circumstance will they ever negotiate what has been offered. They intentionally slow walk each written email response for a week or two and make you relent into accepting the terrible offer. No one you speak to is authorized to negotiate and they will not even run it up the flag pole to a person who can.
4.) Then eventually they tell you if you want to be able to negotiate you will have to close this claim and start all over again and file it a different way so it is negotiable. Bull. They are just trying to make it seem like you will never get what you are owed and that you should just accept what they have offered.
5.) Then after two months or so and much back and forth with zero progress, they finally ask what it will take to settle this and they rapidly begin to negotiate. I think it took two rounds of negotiating to get them from 100K useful life to 240K useful life on my usage deduction in the buyback. In many states there is no usage deduction if you let them provide you with a replacement vehicle, so you don't have to battle this if you go that route.
