Lawyer Legal Advice – Auto Accident & Injury Claims

This is a video that I ran across on youtube. This guy knows how to describe what happened in his auto collision:

Texas’ minimum limits for automobile liability insurance in 2011 is now 30/60/25. What does this mean?

This affects automobile accidents and personal injury lawyers and their clients’ cases in the following ways:

This means that a driver in Texas is required to carry liability coverage that will pay if that person is legally responsible for causing harms or losses in the following amounts:
1) Up to $30,000 per person injured (old limits were $20,000.00).
2) Up to $60,000 per incident for injuries (old limits were $40,000.00 – this means that if a person causes injury to 4 people in one accident, they must divide up the $60,000 coverage 4 ways (ie, if everyone’s injury was equal – it would be $15,000 per person under the new $60,000 limits – or if there are only 2 people injured, you would have $30,000 per person.
3) Up to $25,000 per incident for property damage (old limits were $15,000). This means that the minimum limits a person can carry will pay up to $25,000 for damage to another person’s automobile – no more. If you have a $50,000 vehicle, you better have underinsured motorist coverage.

The above limits are the minimum limits. You can carry above those amounts, but cannot carry less than those stated above. Most insurance companies offer more in coverage – because they can charge more if they sell you more – and because many people need more coverage than the minimum limits.

How to stop your car if you experience “sudden acceleration”.

Basically, change into “neutral” and brake hard – the engine will still be accelerating, but because its in neutral, you will stop.

Drivers of 18 wheelers have been banned from texting and driving.  People are 20 times as likely to have an accident while texting:

Just a little background on me regarding why I’m writing this. I’m not an insurance agent, I’m a personal injury lawyer. Many of my cases revolve around automobile accidents though. Prior to attending law school, I worked as a claims adjuster for 7 years. I’ve been doing injury claims for either the insurance company, or as a plaintiff’s trial lawyer since 1989.

Two types of coverage you should make sure you have:

1) Number 1 – Uninsured / Underinsured Motorist coverage for both property damage and bodily injury.

Why?  Because about 25% to 33% of all drivers you come across in Texas are uninsured for one reason or another.  Either they never bothered to purchase it, they forgot to pay their premium, they are allowing someone to drive their vehicle who is an excluded driver under the policy, or some other variation that causes them to be uninsured for the accident they cause.

This means you have a 25% – 33% chance that if someone runs into you, you will need to file a claim under your own insurance to get your car taken care of and pay for any medical bills that your health coverage will not pay (deductibles, copays, out of network facilities, etc.  It can add up – medical bills  are not cheap – especially if your health insurance doesn’t cover them).

Uninsured covers if the other driver doesn’t have insurance.  Underinsured – on the other hand, covers if the other driver doesn’t have enough insurance.  If you are driving a vehicle that is worth more than $25,000.00 you definitely should carry Underinsured motorist coverage.  A vast majority of drivers have the $25,000 minimum limits.  If they cause your vehicle to be totaled, you will only recover up to their limits ($25,000.00) even if you have a $40,000 – $50,000 car.

The other thing that is nice about Uninsured Motorist coverage for your car is that the deductible is only $250.   Additionally, its the type of coverage that places a burden on your insurance company to attempt to collect against the uninsured driver if the driver is known.

The downside of Uninsured Motorist coverage is that it acts in the place of the other driver’s insurance.  Which means that when you use it, your insurance company will investigate the claim with an eye towards defending the other driver’s actions.   So if the accident is a swearing match (he said / she said) you might not be able to collect.  You can only collect on Uninsured / Underinsured Motorist coverage if the other driver was at fault for your harms and losses.

2)  Personal Injury Protection – is a coverage that pays for your medical bills up front if you are hurt.  You don’t have to wait to “settle” your case before using your Personal Injury Protection coverage.  Most people carry $2500 in PIP coverage (which is the minimum amount required to be offered by law), but the amount is only limited by what your insurance company will offer.  Typical amounts offered are $2500, $5000, or $10,000 in coverage.

The good part of Personal Injury Protection is that it covers not only your medical bills, but it covers up to 80% of your lost income, and reasonable household bills (such as if your injury was bad enough to need to hire someone to help with cleaning, or mowing, etc).   It is a much better coverage than MedPay coverage which only covers medical bills (typically MedPay is also written for the same amounts offered for Personal Injury Protection – $2500, $5000, $10,000 in coverages).

Its not a ton of money, but it can cover your deductibles and copays if you have a more serious injury.  It can also cover much of your lost income, or if you need to hire additional help around the house due to an injury.

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I run across many cases where people have opted out of these two coverages.  Its a mistake not to have them.  If you are paying for insurance each month, don’t you want something that you can actually use for yourself if you need to use it? These coverages do just that.

If a case goes to trial, one of the most important parts of the trial is the jury selection. In auto accident cases, jury selection is extremely important. The insurance industry has done a great job convincing the public that anyone who is injured in an accident is possibly faking it. In Dallas County, this is especially true. So going into a trial, any Dallas automobile accident lawyer needs to address that first hurdle in jury selection. You cannot remove everyone that has any opinion on lawsuits. That would leave you with nobody, and the judges will not usually allow that. They want to get your case into trial and get the case over and off their docket typically. But you do have a right to have jurors who have not already made up their mind before ever hearing any evidence.

The following clip is a good refresher on jury selection / voir dire and how to do an effective voir dire / jury selection:

I’m pulling up my soap box, so . . . here it goes . . .

Texas Auto Insurers can deny coverage even if there is coverage – if the driver of the other vehicle refuses to call his insurance company. Believe it or not, this is now the law in Texas. Now the insurance company can just throw their hands up, not try to contact their insured at all, and then deny the claim because their insured is “not cooperating with them” by calling in the claim.

There are some nuances. If the insurance company can claim they were “prejudiced” by the noncooperation, then they are allowed to disclaim coverage. So, examples of incidents where they could not disclaim coverage would be if the defendant driver admitted to the insurance company he was at fault and asked them to take care of the claim, then the insurance company could not claim prejudice with regards to liability if their driver then disappears and doesn’t ever call the insurance company back.

But what happens if the insurance company wants to dispute whether the impact was hard enough to have caused injury? What if the driver admits he caused the accident, then disappears and doesn’t help the insurance company try to dispute the severity of the impact and whether it could have caused injury. Can they deny coverage for this reason? Insurance companies think yes. They are doing it all over the state.

Imagine this scenario if you will . . .

You are in a car wreck, not a little one, but a big one – your car is totaled. You are hurt, maybe you missed some work. Maybe a little bit of everything . . . Imagine it starts like this:

You drive through a green light and suddenly you see a flash from your drivers side, you don’t even have time to turn before your car is smashed, spinning, your airbags go off in your face, and smoke from the airbags fill the inside of your car.

A van full of nuns stops to help you and say they saw the whole thing. They tell you that they saw the other driver driving crazy, almost ran them over, and they watched as he ran right through the red light and smashed into you. The other driver then shoots you and the nuns the middle finger as you sit there waiting for the police – he’s slurring his words and screaming drunken profanities at you . . .

The police come out . . . they arrest and haul off the other driver for being DWI. You also overhear the police talking about how he was drunk and disorderly, and how he admitted to the police that he was watching porn on his I-Phone when the accident happened.

The police give you his insurance card. Your husband/wife calls this drunk idiot’s insurance company to report what happened while you are taken by ambulance to the hospital. Your husband tells you that the insurance company confirmed that the drunk does have insurance.

A couple weeks later, the insurance company for this guy calls you and says “Ms. Accident Victim, we have been unable to locate our insured, we cannot authorize payment until we actually talk to him. He posted bond to get out of jail and apparently fled to Mexico from what his family tells us. If we can’t talk to him, we will be forced to deny coverage.”

You ask, “Did he have coverage at the time?” Insurance adjuster replies “yes, but we can disclaim coverage if he doesn’t cooperate with us, and since he’s fled the country, we don’t owe the claim – unless you can find him for us.”

Think it can’t happen? I have a case right now where a defendant was arrested for DWI after rearending my client, then INS put a hold on him while he was in jail in Dallas County. His insurance company (Infinity Insurance) has now sent a letter denying coverage – saying their insured won’t contact them regarding what happened. We’ve told them that he was deported, they seem to be very happy about that situation – another reason to deny coverage. I’ll file a lawsuit.

But you know what the funny thing is, I’ll be the one who is villainized by the insurance industry and tort reformers. My lawsuit will just be another lawsuit to them, more proof of all the lawsuit crazy lawyers in this state. They won’t tell you the reason I’m filing my lawsuit. They will likely refer to the McDonalds case from 20 years ago (she was hurt in 1992, but they still talk about it today like it happened last year – still pushing tort reform off one case that made bad headlines).

Maybe Legislators ought to look at the insurance industry and how they treat people and pass some legislation on that end. Something that says they cannot deny coverage in these situations. That the burden is on the insurance company to contact the insured and that if they are unable to contact their insured that they still must pay the claim if the injured party prevails in proving the defendant was at fault and caused the damage claimed. This would put insurers feet to the fire and force them to “try” to contact their insureds. As the law is now, the incentive is to try NOT to contact their insureds so they can then deny coverage for noncooperation. Some legislation putting the burden on the insurance company to do what we all expect that they should do might reduce the number of lawsuits as much if not more than the proposed types of tort reform – if insurance companies felt they might actually be punished for bad behavior, maybe they would find an incentive to treat people more fairly, and maybe people wouldn’t be forced to file lawsuits in situations where there shouldn’t be a lawsuit in the first place.

Video of an interview with Mark Lanier – I like his style, he’s had some great trial results nationwide:

Auto accident injury / injuries are usually not  caused by “accidents”.  Usually, someone has decided they are in too big of a hurry to follow the law.  The traffic codes are written to deter people from driving unsafely.   Some people decide they don’t have the time to follow the law, they cause an accident, and cause someone harm or injury.   Everyone knows its illegal to break the traffic codes, and unsafe to do some other things while driving (cellphone use, messing with the radio, putting on makeup).

The insurance company then tries to victimize you by not paying for your injury.  They try to do what all insurance companies and their lawyers do – THIS IS THE INSURANCE DEFENSE LAWYER (and adjuster) DEFENSE in almost every case:  1) it wasn’t our person’s fault or was only partially his fault, 2) but even if our person was at fault, you didn’t suffer an injury, 3) but even if you did suffer an injury, the injury wasn’t that bad, 4) but even if the injury was bad, the injury was preexisting so we aren’t responsible for it.

Personal injury lawyers all over the country face this defense from insurers, and this defense almost exclusively in a vast majority of their cases.

Doug Goyen, Attorney

www.douggoyen.com

www.dwilawyerdallas.com

www.dallascarcrashlawyer.com

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