Subrogation and How It Affects Your Insurance

Subrogation is a concept that's understood among legal and insurance firms but rarely by the policyholders they represent. Rather than leave it to the professionals, it is to your advantage to know an overview of the process. The more knowledgeable you are, the more likely it is that an insurance lawsuit will work out favorably.

Every insurance policy you own is a commitment that, if something bad happens to you, the firm on the other end of the policy will make good in a timely fashion. If a storm damages your home, your property insurance steps in to pay you or enable the repairs, subject to state property damage laws.

But since ascertaining who is financially responsible for services or repairs is typically a heavily involved affair – and time spent waiting sometimes compounds the damage to the policyholder – insurance companies often decide to pay up front and assign blame after the fact. They then need a method to get back the costs if, in the end, they weren't responsible for the payout.

Can You Give an Example?

You are in a traffic-light accident. Another car collided with yours. The police show up to assess the situation, you exchange insurance details, and you go on your way. You have comprehensive insurance and file a repair claim. Later police tell the insurance companies that the other driver was entirely at fault and her insurance policy should have paid for the repair of your vehicle. How does your insurance company get its funds back?

How Subrogation Works

This is where subrogation comes in. It is the process that an insurance company uses to claim payment after it has paid for something that should have been paid by some other entity. Some insurance firms have in-house property damage lawyers and personal injury attorneys, or a department dedicated to subrogation; others contract with a law firm. Ordinarily, only you can sue for damages to your self or property. But under subrogation law, your insurer is considered to have some of your rights in exchange for making good on the damages. It can go after the money originally due to you, because it has covered the amount already.

Why Should I Care?

For a start, if your insurance policy stipulated a deductible, your insurer wasn't the only one who had to pay. In a $10,000 accident with a $1,000 deductible, you lost some money too – to be precise, $1,000. If your insurance company is lax about bringing subrogation cases to court, it might opt to recoup its costs by ballooning your premiums and call it a day. On the other hand, if it knows which cases it is owed and pursues those cases enthusiastically, it is acting both in its own interests and in yours. If all $10,000 is recovered, you will get your full thousand-dollar deductible back. If it recovers half (for instance, in a case where you are found one-half responsible), you'll typically get half your deductible back, based on the laws in most states.

Moreover, if the total loss of an accident is over your maximum coverage amount, you could be in for a stiff bill. If your insurance company or its property damage lawyers, such as workmans comp lawyer Milton, ga, pursue subrogation and succeeds, it will recover your losses as well as its own.

All insurers are not created equal. When shopping around, it's worth measuring the records of competing agencies to evaluate if they pursue valid subrogation claims; if they do so with some expediency; if they keep their policyholders advised as the case continues; and if they then process successfully won reimbursements immediately so that you can get your deductible back and move on with your life. If, instead, an insurance company has a reputation of honoring claims that aren't its responsibility and then covering its profit margin by raising your premiums, you'll feel the sting later.