Hi, once again.  I’m Joe Miller, trial attorney, and I want to welcome you to our video series once again where we discuss frequent questions that our clients have had over the years.  We discuss legal issues in an attempt to answer some of these questions.

One of the most frequent things that comes up as our clients often ask us, you know, we know that you need to know about the insurance of the car that hit me.  That’s the person that needs to pay, because I was in a car accident, and now I need to recover some money against this person.  But why are you asking me – and I oftentimes want to know the answer to this – why are you asking me about my insurance or the insurance of the person that owned the vehicle I was riding in?  The accident wasn’t my fault.  The accident wasn’t their fault.  What do you need that information for?  

The answer is that oftentimes we need to know that information for several reasons.  What we’re going to talk about in this video is the importance of uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage.  So let’s talk about the first of those.  

What is uninsured motorist coverage?  Well, it’s just like it sounds.  If the other person that hit you turns out to have no insurance, or in many cases if you don’t know who the person was who hit you, you’re going to need to rely on your policy or the policy of the owner of the vehicle that you were riding in.  So that’s the first thing we’re going to look to in case the defendant has no insurance, or we don’t have any way of finding out what the policy is.  

Let’s take a look at a policy that just has this uninsured coverage that we’re talking about, with the minimum limits on this policy, and we’re going to use a little T.V. magic to show you that.  Okay, here we go.  See, this is just a minimum $25,000 policy.  You’ll notice down here that we have, it says uninsured motorist $25,000.  Okay, that’s the minimum coverage.  

So what that means that means is that if a person hits you and either they don’t have coverage or what-have-you, you have $25,000 of insurance coverage either on your vehicle or the person whose vehicle you were riding in, if they have this policy they’re going to have that coverage.  Okay?  That’s what we’re going to need to know then.  

Now, let’s take a second scenario.  Let’s assume that God forbid your injuries are very severe in the wreck, and even though the other person has insurance, their coverage is very low and is not going to compensate you sufficiently for the injuries that you’ve  received.  Now we need to look to underinsured coverage.  And that is also just what it sounds like.  Which means that there’s not enough insurance – even though the other person does have insurance, there’s not enough there to cover you for the injuries that you received.  

Now what we need to do is look at either your coverage, or the coverage of the person whose vehicle you were riding in to see if there’s any additional coverage on top of the person who hit you to see if we can get to that.  

The way this works logistically is if your injuries are very severe, we’re going to get the coverage from the first policy, the policy the person hit you, they’re going to offer that coverage, and we’ll get a letter from them.  Let’s say it’s minimum coverage.  Let’s go back to that policy we saw a moment ago, the one with $25,000.  We’re going to get a letter from that insurance company saying we’re offering our coverage to you of $25,000 for these injuries.

Now, your injuries are worth you know, let’s say you have $100,000 in medical bills, much more than that.  So they’re going to offer their coverage.  What happens then is we take that letter and send it to the underinsured carrier, which is either going to be your carrier or the carrier of the owner of vehicle you were riding in.  So let’s take a look at how this plays out in that scenario.

Let’s assume that the person had the $25,000 policy.  They’ve offered that coverage.  Now let’s look at this policy.  Okay?  This is, you’ll see, a $100,000 per person policy.  Alright?  And then down here you see where it says the uninsured coverage, which really also means underinsured coverage, because it’s the Virginia policy.  You’re going to have both.  What this means is that you take that $25,000 and you look at the $100,000, that means there is an additional $75,000 of coverage.  The $25,000 that was offered on the other policy from the defendant, or the person that hit the car, and here we have another $75,000 to add up to the $100,000.  The way this works, is that it’s not another $100,000.  It is the $25,000 limit, plus the $75,000 to equal the $100,000 in coverage.

Let’s look at one policy.  Here we see a larger policy.  This person has a policy of $300,000-per-person coverage in uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage.  That means that if you have very, very severe, hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills, or permanent injuries, there’s going to be an additional – and remember the scenario where there was only $25,000 in the liability coverage – there’s going to be an additional $275,000 in underinsured motorist coverage.  

So as you can see, it becomes very important in these cases to determine if there’s severe injuries particularly, to determine as soon as possible what the underinsured coverage is, what the liability coverage is, right away so we can get all the coverages straightened out, put everybody on notice, and we know where we stand.  

I hope I’ve answered your questions on this matter.  We look forward to helping you on your case.  Thank you.  Joe Miller, trial attorney.