South Florida Personal Injury Blog

It’s 6:15 p.m. on a Tuesday and you’re stuck in stop-and-go traffic on your way back home. You take your eyes off the road for a split second and it happens – you rear end the car in front of you. Nothing serious, just a small dent. So you put your hazards on and you step out just as the other driver does. The two of you exchange the ceremonial “are you ok?” – and you’re thinking to yourself, “of course she has got to be ok, I mean I only hit are at 5 mph and there’s barely a noticeable dent.” You apologize but she tells you that she prefers to have a police report. So now you’re thinking “great, now I have to deal with a ticket.” So long story short, you spend 45 minutes on the side of the road and you finally leave and get home.

Fort Lauderdale personal injury attorneys know Florida drivers are bombarded with advertisements regarding who they should call when they are in accident. Of course, these advertisements make no mention of the criteria needed to receive insurance benefits; rather they leave the lay person to believe that a mere accident is all that needs to occur in order to make lots of money.

More likely than not this person that you hit will contact someone - either an attorney or a referral agency. If you are lucky, this matter will be resolved between your insurance company and the other driver amicably. On the other hand, there are many who are dragged in a horrible situation that they never thought could happen.

Building on top of our scenario above: Let’s say for example you have an insurance policy that extends $25,000/$50,000 of bodily injury (BI) liability coverage ($25k per person/$50k per accident). Six months after the accident you get a letter from your insurance company that says you may be receiving lawsuit papers in the mail and if you do that you should let the adjuster know right away. So you read it, and put it down- honestly what else are you going to do? What this letter is really saying is that over the past six months your insurance company was in a heated battle with the driver you hit and neither side was willing to accept the proposed offer of settlement. So now you are getting sued. Sure enough, you receive a Complaint which alleges that you are being sued. You think to yourself that this is why we carry insurance.

Ordinarily when a person is being sued, they, in their sole discretion, have the authority to decide whether or not they want to settle the case. Well, when you are insured and your insurer is responsible to pay the damages up to your policy limits, they retain this power, and essentially you are pushed aside as a spectator.

Why does this matter? This matters because if the driver you hit is potentially looking at requesting a judgment in excess of your policy limit, who do you think is responsible for paying ever cent over and above your $25,000 policy? You are, of course.

The problem is that you now become a business decision. Of course your interests and the insurance companies interest are not that far off because both of you want to resolve the case for as little as possible. The real issue arises when the Plaintiff is offering to settle the case for an amount within your policy limits and more often than not a demand for the policy limits are made. Now because the adjuster has rejected this settlement you now become potentially exposed for your personal assets.
This is a tricky situation that not many insured drivers are aware of. The moral of the story is that we all should be certain that we carry enough coverage to protect our personal assets.

Danny Cohen, Esq.