Last week I spent three days trying a car accident case in the Circuit Court for Charles County. There were two defendants- the driver who caused the accident, and my client’s insurance carrier. There was a direct suit against the insurance carrier because the defendant driver had the minimum insurance permitted in Maryland (20k per person, 40k per incident), and we alleged that the plaintiff’s damages exceeded the defendant’s policy limit. So we brought in my client’s insurance company as a defendant because there were underinsured motorists’ benefits available to cover the damages that exceeded the defendant driver’s policy.
When you are litigating against the tortfeasor and the UM/UIM carrier, there are two legal issues you should expect to address before the trial begins.
First, it is a near-certainty that the insurance company will make a motion to allow it to try the case without being identified to the jury. This makes sense from their perspective because they do not want the jury to know that any damages will be paid by an insurance company, or that the Plaintiff was forced to sue his own insurer.