Fayetteville motorists purchase vehicle insurance to compensate them if they are ever in an auto accident. They assume that if they have adequate coverage, they will be compensated for any injuries and any damages to vehicles.
Sometimes, though, insurance companies try to blame the victims of accidents so that they do not need to fully compensate victims or their surviving family members. Fortunately, personal injury attorneys can help to protect people when their insurance companies refuse to adequately compensate them after a serious or fatal car accident in North Carolina.
One family spent the last two years dealing with this very frustrating type of situation with a popular insurance company. The family’s daughter was killed in a car accent in June 2010 after another driver ran a red light and crashed into the victim’s vehicle. When the victim’s family filed a lawsuit to obtain compensation for their loss, the victim’s insurance company tried to intervene in the lawsuit to prove that the family’s daughter was the negligent driver.
The insurance company tried to convince the jury that the girl was at fault, and even relied on the testimony of an unreliable witness — a passenger in the girl’s vehicle that suffered from brain damage and memory loss because of the accident. The jury was not convinced.
It appeared that the company was intervening in order to avoid paying $75,000 of the girl’s uninsured or underinsured driver’s coverage that was not paid by the negligent driver’s insurance company. The other company had paid $25,000 to the victim’s family, which was its coverage limit on the other driver’s policy for such accidents.
The victim’s family is now hoping that, with the resolution of the court case, the insurance company will compensate them the $75,000 they believe they are entitled to receive for their loss.
Source: Businessweek, “Progressive insurance on defense after court case,” Matthew Barakat, Aug. 16, 2012