The Things You Need to Know About Subrogation

Subrogation is an idea that's well-known in legal and insurance circles but sometimes not by the people they represent. If this term has come up when dealing with your insurance agent or a legal proceeding, it would be to your advantage to comprehend an overview of the process. The more you know about it, the better decisions you can make about your insurance company.

Any insurance policy you have is a promise that, if something bad occurs, the insurer of the policy will make good in one way or another in a timely manner. If your vehicle is in a fender-bender, insurance adjusters (and the judicial system, when necessary) determine who was at fault and that party's insurance covers the damages.

But since figuring out who is financially responsible for services or repairs is typically a heavily involved affair – and time spent waiting in some cases adds to the damage to the policyholder – insurance firms often decide to pay up front and assign blame afterward. They then need a way to get back the costs if, once the situation is fully assessed, they weren't responsible for the payout.

Can You Give an Example?

You go to the emergency room with a deeply cut finger. You give the nurse your medical insurance card and she takes down your coverage details. You get taken care of and your insurer is billed for the medical care. But on the following day, when you get to your place of employment – where the injury occurred – your boss hands you workers compensation forms to file. Your company's workers comp policy is actually responsible for the hospital trip, not your medical insurance. The latter has a right to recover its costs somehow.

How Does Subrogation Work?

This is where subrogation comes in. It is the method that an insurance company uses to claim payment when it pays out a claim that turned out not to be its responsibility. 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. Usually, only you can sue for damages to your self or property. But under subrogation law, your insurer is given some of your rights for having taken care of the damages. It can go after the money originally due to you, because it has covered the amount already.

How Does This Affect Individuals?

For a start, if you have a deductible, it wasn't just your insurer that had to pay. In a $10,000 accident with a $1,000 deductible, you have a stake in the outcome as well – to be precise, $1,000. If your insurance company is lax about bringing subrogation cases to court, it might choose to recoup its expenses by ballooning your premiums. On the other hand, if it has a competent legal team and goes after those cases aggressively, it is acting both in its own interests and in yours. If all of the money 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 culpable), you'll typically get half your deductible back, depending on your state laws.

Additionally, if the total expense of an accident is over your maximum coverage amount, you may have had to pay the difference, which can be extremely costly. If your insurance company or its property damage lawyers, such as Personal injury attorney Lithia Springs, GA, successfully press a subrogation case, it will recover your losses as well as its own.

All insurance agencies are not created equal. When shopping around, it's worth looking at the reputations of competing companies to determine if they pursue winnable subrogation claims; if they do so without delay; if they keep their policyholders updated as the case proceeds; and if they then process successfully won reimbursements right away so that you can get your losses back and move on with your life. If, instead, an insurer has a record of paying out claims that aren't its responsibility and then protecting its income by raising your premiums, you'll feel the sting later.

Personal injury attorney Lithia Springs, GA