quote:
Let’s say you’re rocking a $15,000 minimum liability policy. You rear end someone, no liability dispute. Plaintiff presents evidence that he’s got a $25,000 claim, but offers to accept your policy limits in exchange for releasing you from further liability. They’ll probably set a time limit for the insurance company to accept their offer. Let’s say your insurer decides to “fight on your behalf” and deny the claim because you don’t think the guy you hit was really hurt. You go to trial, call the plaintiff a liar and accuse him of faking his symptoms to generate a bodily injury claim. The judge, elected with strong support from plaintiff attorneys, or the jurors, many of whom would otherwise be sitting at home watching their stories amid commercials about the evil insurance companies and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars all these people seem to get by just calling a lawyer after an accident, decides the guy you hit must have been hurt and awards him $50,000. After all, they’d hope a jury would be generous for their own claim when they get in their next accident. So now you have a judgment against you for the excess portion, $35,000. Are you going to suck it up, be glad that your insurer “fought on your behalf” and cough up $35,000? No, you’re going to blame your insurance company for not settling the claim when they had the chance to protect you. Conveniently, Louisiana law allows you to assign whatever rights you might have against your own insurer for failing to settle the claim and protect you. The attorney for the plaintiff might come offer to release you in exchange for an assignment of your rights against your insurer. Of course, you’ll agree and that attorney will then file a new lawsuit against your insurer to try to collect that excess judgment by asserting your claim that they failed to act reasonably, settle the claim and protect you from that exposure. All that to say, the insurer’s potential liability doesn’t end at their policy limits. They don’t get to just arbitrarily decide to “fight” for you. If that fight goes badly, they could end up having to pay the entire claim, not just their policy limits. The plaintiff attorneys are all angling to set this scenario up so they can ultimately collect amounts beyond the policy limits. Thus, it’s a game to balance investing enough money in plaintiff’s medical treatment to increase the value of the claim to force the insurer to settle, but not invest so much money that settling for the policy limits leaves too little for the plaintiff to recover after the attorney and the doctors get their cuts of the settlement.

This guy gets it. I work for the insurance company. Specifically handle files with attorney representation. The deck is completely stacked against the insurance company and the entire system is a scam. Louisiana is a joke of a state run by the plaintiff attorneys