Hi, I’m Joe Miller, trial attorney with the law firm of Accidental Injury Advocates.  I want to welcome you to our practice series.  Here we try to answer a number of questions that folks may have about injury cases in general that we’ve heard over the years.  

The number one factor that’s going to determine the value of your case is available coverage for insurance on your vehicle, on the other person’s vehicle, and overall.  Okay?  

Why is that?  Well, we’ve had cases, and many attorneys have had cases in Virginia and North Carolina.  Of course, this applies less to what we call No-Fault states where everyone is required to carry a great deal of insurance.  But in Virginia and North Carolina – let’s start with Virginia.  The minimum coverage in Virginia is $25,000 for liability coverage.  That means if someone causes you serious injury or death, unless you have a you know, very high underinsured motorist coverage, all that’s going to be available is the $25,000 limit of coverage on the defendant’s vehicle.  In North Carolina the minimum limit is $30,000 – $5,000 more.  

So no matter what kind of severity of injury you have, or even if there’s death, God forbid, the maximum that can be recovered is going to be the minimum limits unless you have a higher underinsured motorist policy, which we discuss elsewhere in these videos.  

So that can be very disconcerting because you know, you have a very serious injury, and what are you going to do?  You may ask well, why can’t we go after the defendant?  I mean, we can sue the person that hit me.  Why can’t we get more money from them?  And the reason is, as many of you know, is that there’s a reason that people purchase minimum coverage most of the time.  That’s because they don’t have the funds to afford more coverage.  And that means that there probably are not going to be assets there for you to obtain.  Even famous people like O. J. had a judgment against him, and it took years and years and years for the family to be able to recover anything from Mr. Simpson.  He tried to hide his assets.  He tried to run here, he tried to run there after they had obtained a substantial judgment against him.  

So again, insurance coverage is the number one thing that’s going to determine the value of your case.  Obviously, you have a commercial defendant, a large trucking company, let’s say that’s going to have typically larger limits – you know, $1 million policy limit plus you have the value of the company itself, and all its assets – that’s going to be less of a factor.  

Thank you for watching, and we look forward to getting to work on your case.  Joe Miller, trial attorney.  Thank you.