One of the difficult things we deal with every day is when our clients are injured in a car accident caused by somebody else and they’ve got minimal coverage in Maryland, and their injuries are significant. It happens every day and it’s tough, because in Maryland, the minimum amount of insurance coverage that you need to carry is $30,000.
And if a client comes to us and they’ve got a serious injury—and sometimes it’s evident, but sometimes it takes a couple weeks or a couple months of treatment and the medical bills add up—but in the very beginning of a case, in a personal injury case in Maryland where the driver who caused the accident has minimum limits of $30,000 and our clients have injuries that far exceed those limits, two things happen:
One, if they—our clients—have the same amount of coverage, $30,000, that’s the maximum they can get, and their ceiling on recovery could be $30,000. However, oftentimes when our clients are carrying more coverage in Maryland on their policies, there’s uninsured motorist coverage when the other driver doesn’t have any insurance.
But in situations where the other driver has minimum coverage and the case is worth more than that coverage, $30,000, they can tap into their underinsured motorist coverage, or UIM coverage, and potentially add tens of thousands of dollars more of recovery to their case merely by having a much better policy and much higher limits than the person who caused the accident.
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Adam Smallow Injury Lawyers
