Slight Arm Fracture Case Settles For Policy Limits of $30,000

Our client, a young female, was a passenger in a car driven by her friend. The car had five occupants. As our client and her friends were driving home after a night out, suddenly another person cut them off and struck the vehicle as they were turning onto an off ramp. The impact caused our client’s vehicle to flip over. Two of the occupants of our client’s vehicle died at the accident scene. Fortunately, our client survived. However, she did suffer a minor fracture to her arm.

Defendant only had a small bodily injury policy

Within weeks of the accident, the insurance company for the defendant called our firm to inform us that their insured only carried a 10/20 bodily injury policy. This means that the most any person can receive from the insurance policy is $10,000 and the most the insurance company will ever pay for one particular claim is $20,000, irrespective of the number of victims. They informed our firm that because two people had died, they were tendering out $10,000 to the estate of both decedents, which would exhaust the limits of $20,000. As a result, there would not be any coverage for our client.

Our Client Allegedly Did Not Have Uninsured Motorist Coverage

Under Florida Law, if a defendant does not have enough bodily injury coverage, then a claim must be filed with the plaintiff’s own uninsured motorist coverage. If the plaintiff does not have uninsured motorist coverage, then it will be very difficult to recover the money that the plaintiff deserves. After our firm discovered that the defendant only had a 10/20 bodily injury policy, we immediately requested our client’s own insurance coverage to see if she had uninsured motorist. To our surprise and our client’s surprise, our client did not have the coverage on her policy. Most attorneys would have dropped the case at this point. But our firm did not. We did not understand how our client could have no idea that she did not carry uninsured motorist coverage—which is the most important coverage to have on one’s automobile insurance policy. We decided to investigate this issue further.

Our Firm Gets Our Client Approved For Uninsured Motorist Benefits

Under Florida Law, the insurance company has to get a signed rejection of uninsured motorist coverage. Failure to get this rejection letter means that the insurance company must afford uninsured motorist coverage in the same amount as the bodily injury coverage. Our firm quickly demanded the signed rejection letter once we were informed that our client failed to carry uninsured motorist coverage. Within a couple weeks, the insurance company informed us that they could not produce a signed uninsured motorist rejection letter. They offered to pay our client $10,000, which was the same amount of bodily injury coverage available. We rejected this offer and countered that since our client had three vehicles on the policy, the insurance company needed to afford $10,000 on each of the three vehicles for a total of $30,000. After a lengthy negotiation, the insurance company agreed and tendered out $30,000 to our client! Our client was absolutely thrilled that our firm went the extra mile to be sure that we recovered the maximum benefits allowed under the law. Not only would many law firms have dropped the case once it was discovered that there was no bodily injury and uninsured motorist benefits available for our client, but many firms would also have simply accepted the $10,000 without pursuing the remaining $20,000 available.

Call us for a free consultation. There is no fee or costs unless we recover money for you.