A defendant’s insurance policy limits include important details for an injury claim investigation. Liability limit tracing helps obtain crucial details about coverage available for property damage, bodily injury, and other claims. Pursuing any claim comes with challenges. Investigating liability limits helps overcome potential obstacles and provides your attorney with the vital information they need to navigate your case.
What Details Are Revealed with Liability Limit Tracing?
Investigating the defendant’s insurance policy can take time, but it’s a crucial part of building your claim. Liability limit tracing can obtain pertinent details such as:
- The defendant’s insurance policy number
- Confirmation that a policy exists
- Limits on a particular policy on the date of a loss
- Verification a defendant was insured on the date of loss
- An umbrella policy or other excess coverage (if existing coverage is insufficient)
Liability limit tracing also determines the maximum amount available so an attorney can negotiate for a severely injured client. If the maximum policy amount doesn’t cover all the expenses and damages, an attorney can identify other means to pursue compensation. Therefore, this stage is an extremely important part of any injury claim investigation.
What Are the Benefits of Liability Limit Tracing?
Insurance liability limits should be investigated at the beginning of a case or before it is filed. The benefits of tracing liability limits and outsourcing this step to a third party include:
- Helps Determine If Pursuing a Case Is Worth It: A personal injury case involves committing time and money. Liability limit tracing helps your legal team determine whether it’s worth it to take on a new case. If the defendant is uninsured or underinsured, there may be too few financial resources available.
- Reveals Financial Details of the Insurance Policy: Knowing the financial aspects of the policy provides an attorney with the details needed to assess the potential risks of pursuing a claim. Using the information obtained, your attorney can draft a policy limit demand that requests the maximum amount from the insurance company, which must reveal in writing whether they accept or reject the demand. The insurer has a limited amount of time to respond.
- Determine What the Claim Is Worth: Aside from revealing the potential payout of the claim, liability limit tracing can help determine the value of the case. It can reveal what your attorney can legally demand before settlement negotiations begin.
- Provides Details on Medical Coverage: Medical treatment is crucial to personal injury cases. It also represents a significant expense for the plaintiff. The defendant’s insurance policy should provide coverage for the plaintiff’s treatment plan.
If treatment costs more than the available coverage, an attorney’s client will have out-of-pocket expenses that create undue stress. Searching for additional coverage or areas of liability can help increase compensation beyond coverage limits. However, your legal team must first determine what coverage is available.
- Saves Your Lawyer Time: Fund Capital America provides an insurance research service that accesses every detail of the defendant’s policy. You can contact the insurance company directly, but it has 30 days to disclose policy limits. Furthermore, it can ask the defendant if they approve of their policy limit being disclosed.
A defendant doesn’t have a legal duty to disclose the amount. They’re more likely to authorize disclosure if the claim is an amount more than the policy limit. But their cooperation, or lack thereof, can create roadblocks in a case. You can see how having an outside provider do the research can be beneficial.
How Is Insurance Policy Tracing Done?
Obtaining insurance policy limits can be a multi-step process. In addition to the steps above, a personal injury attorney also sends questions to the defense, which must be answered under oath. If you have direct access to an insurance policy, identifying policy limits is easy; they’re usually listed on the declaration page. However, it can be challenging from a legal perspective, which is a good reason to have an insurance research service help with this step of an injury claim investigation.
At Fund Capital America, we have insurance experts and reliable information sources that help us investigate and trace liability limits. Our turnaround time is fast. Case updates are provided on our portal. We investigate insurance auto insurance, business/commercial insurance, homeowner’s/renter’s insurance, and umbrella policies. Our team can also investigate insurance policy limits for malpractice, premises, and product liability cases.
Contact Us Today
Insurance research takes time and effort. Let the skilled professionals at Fund Capital America obtain insurance policy information for your injury claim investigation. We offer a simple liability limit tracing service that saves law firms and their clients time. No fees are charged if we don’t find the information you need. To learn more about this and other services and receive an encrypted, confidential report, contact us online or call (855) 870-2274.
