South Florida Injury Lawyers Blog
Auto accident insurance companies will always fight to limit the benefits you receive following a crash. This is true whether you are a third-party or their customer.
All auto insurance policies define certain limits based on how much they are willing to pay per-person and how much they will pay per-accident. If the amount from the at-fault driver’s insurance company is insufficient to cover all damages, victims may want to explore recovery through an underinsured motorist (UIM) coverage policy. This could be a policy the victim held directly or one that covered the non-fault driver in a car accident wherein they were a passenger.
In the recent case of Trotter v. Harleysville, plaintiffs argued that the UIM coverage should kick in when the at-fault driver’s insurer did not pay them the full per-person amount to which they were entitled. The UIM insurer, however, argued that the total per-accident limit had been paid by the at-fault driver’s insurer, and thus it was not required to pay any more. The case was weighed recently by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Continue reading →