What Personal Injury Plaintiffs Really Want
Contrary to the popular narrative that all personal injury plaintiffs are greedy, I’ve found that the vast majority of clients I represent just want to be treated fairly.
Case in point: My firm once took a case for a client who was injured in a motor vehicle wreck. This case with a $50,000 liability policy turned into a $2,000,000 settlement from the liability insurer. Our client wasn’t trying to make money. Hell, he didn’t even want to hire a lawyer.
Here’s what happened:
We were retained a few months after our client was injured in a vehicle wreck. He fractured his humerus and developed radial nerve palsy. Radial nerve palsy can result from this fracture because of the location of the radial nerve. Unfortunately for our client, he broke his humerus where the radial nerve traversed the spiral groove.
This was a pretty clear liability wreck. The at-fault driver only had $50,000 in coverage. The medical bills alone were close to $100,000 and our client had a severe injury.
But the reason the client reached out to us wasn’t because of his injuries. It was because the insurer was not responding to his requests to fix his truck!
Turns out, the truck was totaled, but for months the insurer did nothing to handle his property damage claim.
As soon as we were retained, we sent a policy limits demand for $50K. Seems like the insurer would just pay the demand, right? Wrong.
For reasons I’ll never understand, the insurer dragged its feet, just like it did with the property damage claim. It did not respond to our demand nor accept it before the deadline. It never sent the payment by the payment deadline.
Under Georgia law, an insurer can be held liable for an excess verdict where it fails to accept a policy limits demand that an ordinarily prudent insurer would have accepted.
A few weeks before trial against the defendant, the insurer agreed to pay $2,000,000 to settle the case, rather than face a trial with an excess verdict and subsequent bad faith action. Our client also received $500,000 from his uninsured motorist carrier, for a total settlement of $2.5 million.
Our client wasn’t trying to get rich. Despite his serious injuries, he didn’t even want to hire a lawyer. He just wanted to get his truck fixed!
Despite the belief society seems to push that personal injury plaintiffs are out to make money, many of them just want the wrongs against them to be acknowledged and to be treated fairly.
What do you think? Join the conversation with me on LinkedIn.