Attorneys sometimes have to turn down auto insurance cases when the other driver simply doesn’t have enough insurance or worse yet, no insurance at all. It’s particularly a problem in Florida where bodily injury insurance isn’t required.
We asked Brian Labovick, a car accident attorney in South Florida who specializes in auto accident cases, to give us an example of a case he had to turn down because the insurance just wasn’t there.
Yes, it’s so easy to see. You have a client, a very nice person of moderate means with a couple of kids; they have a car that they bought for cash, four or five thousand dollars they saved up for, such as a 2002 Sentra or something reasonable; they’re driving it around and somebody runs a red light and crashes into them and T-bones their car. The driver is in the hospital with a concussion and a broken arm and the passenger in that car is out of the hospital, but they’re hurting terribly. Their hip hurts, their back hurts, their neck hurts and they end up needing a back operation because of it.
There is a very typical case of a red light that was run and someone is hurt. The people in the car that are my clients have PIP (personal injury protections) insurance so their first $10,000 in medical bills will be covered and their property damage, which will cover the other guy’s car except that he ran into them, so it’s obviously not going to pay if the other guy is at fault.
The other guy now becomes the key player here and depending on what the other guy is driving, will usually dictate what type of insurance they have. If the other guy is driving the same type of a car (say a 1998 Volkswagen Jetta) with PIP and PD (property damage) and that’s it, then I have to tell my client I will get his medical bills covered up to his PIP and I wish him the best of luck. I take no fee on that and I give them nothing more than getting their PIP coverage set up for them and they have to go on their way.
They’ve got significant damages and no place to collect their recovery so they can get their medical bills paid, their lost wages paid or their future lost wages paid. I guarantee you that after an accident like that, if you have a permanent injury, you will lose time in your future work life – if you have any significant future work life at all.
As we get older, it gets harder
Labovick summed it up well with these statements, “As we get older, it gets harder. People age, and anytime you have trauma to a body, you have the probability of developing arthritis, ligamentous problems and soft tissue injuries become more and more difficult to live with as time goes by unless you really continue to work them out and get therapy for them. That’s a real typical case that I deal with everyday where we reject someone who has a very legitimate case and we can’t help them.”
