What Does A Personal Injury Lawyer Do? Pt. 2

As promised, here’s another in the series of what a personal injury attorney does for you after you have an auto accident (specifically in North Carolina).

But first, a side note: I can’t possibly write about everything we might do for a client or else I’d do nothing but write and not actually help clients. This series of blog posts is just a summary of what we normally do on a normal case, to help you understand why you could probably use the help. So let’s move on.

After we get a good idea as to the strength of your liability argument and what you should be doing/not doing, we’re already digging into coverage. What does that mean?

There’s a ton of insurance issues that are related to auto accidents in North Carolina. The first is getting in touch with the liability carrier (that’s the insurance company for the person who caused the accident). This does several things: First, it puts them on notice to stop contacting you. One of the biggest problems in injury claims is clients saying the wrong things (often because they’re tricked into doing so) when insurance company reps call them. So this should nip that in the bud. Second, it makes the carrier look into coverage to make sure the liability policy was active. If it’s not, that’s not the end of your claim necessarily, but it will make us take some other actions in response.

Next, we’ll get in touch with your auto insurance carrier. You might have Medical Payments coverage which could really impact your overall recovery. Also, you might have need to access your Underinsured Motorist Coverage. You have a contractual duty to notify your carrier of potential claims as soon as possible, so it’s important to do this early in the claim. This will, depending on the case, get your attorney to look into your UIM limits and determine if we need to look for more coverage, potentially.

Also, we’ll talk about using your health insurance for your treatment. Generally, you should! Chiropractors prefer that you not, often, and that’s fine. But you should make sure your health insurance is being billed for all of your other health care treatment. We will also inquire as to the type of health plan you have. You might have a plan with a “right of reimbursement” on third party claims, which they may call “subrogation” (which isn’t always the right word, but whatever). This means that if they pay for treatment and we get a settlement from an auto carrier, we have to use the settlement to pay them back. Once again, not the end of the world or anything, but we need to look into that. The most common types of plans that have this right are Medicare, Medicaid, State Employee Health Plans, and ERISA plans.

And we’ve just gotten started! Stay tuned for another riveting blog post on this super sexy topic.