PREMIER MISSOURI CAR ACCIDENT LAWYER DISCUSSES UNDERINSURED MOTORIST COVERAGE (UIM)

As a St. Louis, Missouri car accident lawyer, one of the situations I commonly encounter is a client who has been very severely injured due to the negligence of another.  It’s not uncommon for me to handle cases in which there are medical bills in excess of a $100,000.00.  In fact today I received an email from a personal whose medical bills total near $250,000.00.  However, like many others, this individual thought they’d be entitled to recover whatever the jury awarded.  Just because the person responsible for your injuries has insurance, does not mean it is going to cover all of your injuries.  Rather, their insurance is only responsible for compensating up to certain limits.  In Missouri, drivers are only required to carry $25,000.00 of liability coverage.  In Illinois, the requirement is only $20,000.00.  This means even if you have a million dollars in medical bills, it’s quite possible that the defendant’s insurance is only required to pay you the $25,000.00 limit.  Of course, people can purchase liability insurance in any limit they want.  However, what happens all too often is that they purchase very low limits because it is cheaper for them.

So how do you protect yourself from this situation?  The answer is Underinsured Motorist coverage (UIM).  Underinsured Motorist coverage is a type of insurance that you buy when purchasing car insurance.  Its purpose is to further compensate you in the event of an injury when the defendant’s insurance does not fully compensate you.  For instance, let’s take the situation of the person who emailed me today.  He had $250,000.00 in medical bills.  The person who hit him only had $50,000.00 in liability insurance.  This means that after the responsible party’s insurance pays him $50,000.00, he can then turn to his own insurance company and request that he be further compensated under his Underinsured Motorist coverage.  Of course, just like any other type of insurance, Underinsured Motorist coverage comes with certain limits too.  The higher the UIM limit you want, the higher your premium.  However, people are generally shocked at how cheap UIM coverage is.  If you do not have it on your policy now, I highly suggest you add it.  I generally recommend that people carry at least $100,000.00 in UIM coverage.

Of course, just because this is a coverage that you pay for does not mean that your insurance company will roll over and pay it all.  Because a good number of the cases I handle involve severe injuries, this means we often exhaust the policy limits of the responsible driver and are then pursuing Underinsured Motorist claims.  Your insurance will often fight you tooth and nail and it is not uncommon to sue them for the UIM coverage.  What often happens is that they claim your injuries aren’t as severe as you’re alleging and thus they try to pay you the least amount as possible.  In Missouri, there is an underutilized law called Vexatious Refusal to Pay.  In practically all of my Underinsured Motorist cases, I also sue the insurance company for vexatiously refusing the pay the full extent of their policy limits.  This simply means that they have no good reason to deny the claim other than they are trying to save themselves money.

Direct claims against insurance companies such as this, require additional expertise.  It is not like any other car accident case where on just has to prove that the other driver was at fault.  Rather in these cases, we have to delve into insurance industry practices and prove that the insurance company had no good reason for denying the claim.  While this may sound easy to do, the fact is that it takes a very tenacious lawyer.  The reason is that insurance companies notoriously hide all of their claims documents and category refuses to turn them over during discovery. The fact is, if we can’t get our hands on these documents, how can we prove that they were baselessly denying the claim?  It takes an experienced Missouri car accident attorney to understand all the documents which they should be getting and to go fight for them.

Joshua P. Myers is owner and President of Myers Injury Law, LLC.  He focuses his practice exclusively on injury law throughout all of Missouri and Illinois.  Although bases in St. Louis, Missouri, he routinely handles sever injury cases throughout all parts of Missouri and Illinois.  If you would like to speak with him regarding a case, please feel free to call toll free at 888.956.2487.  It is always free to discuss your case and there are never any fees until and unless you recover.