Law Have Mercy!

QUICK TIPS: 3 REAL Client Stories that Prove the Power of UM Coverage Once and For All! [UNAIRED S3 EPISODE]

• Chaz Roberts, AcadianaCasts • Season 3 • Episode 47

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Law Have Mercy! Although Season 3 of the podcast has come to an end, this previously unaired short mini episode has risen from our cutting room floor like a phoenix from the ashes to settle the debate about Uninsured Motorist coverage once and for ALL! 

You may be tired of hearing Chaz preach on and on about the importance of adding UM coverage— but on this never-before-aired footage, he isn’t just preaching—he is PROVING the power of this extra coverage by sharing TRUE STORIES from 3 actual clients who hired his law firm after being injured in a crash…each with a different level of UM coverage and in turn, a different result in their quest for justice after their crashes. 

Imagine being involved in a severe car accident and discovering too late that you lack crucial insurance coverage. Tune in to learn why having full Uninsured Motorist (UM) coverage can make a life-changing difference. 

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This show is co-produced by Carter Simoneaux of AcadianaCasts Network, Chaz H. Roberts of Chaz Roberts Law and Kayli Guidry Bonin of Beau The Agency, and Laith Alferahin.

Speaker 1:

So in today's episode, I want to give you a masterclass when it comes to uninsured motorist coverage, right? So you've heard me talk about uninsured motorist coverage a lot, right? Why? Because it's so important, and I want to demonstrate with three separate stories, real cases that I've had in three scenarios One where a person had uninsured motorist coverage, one had uninsured motorist coverage economic only.

Speaker 1:

And one didninsured motorist coverage economic only and one didn't have any UM coverage. When I say UM coverage, I mean uninsured motorist coverage. So what is it? So you get in a wreck and the other person's at fault. You assume everything's going to be okay because they have some type of insurance. Well, that's not true, right, because there's a lot of people that have no insurance and, believe it or not, reckless drivers oftentimes don't take care of their financial responsibilities. Okay, so it often happens that the person, the people who cause the most harm, have the least amount of insurance because they're not as careful with their driving habits and financial responsibilities. It's tough out there, right, because 40 of people either have no insurance or just the minimum. And one thing you need to know about uninsured motorist coverage, too, is that it's not just if the other person's uninsured, it's if they don't have enough insurance. Why wouldn't they have enough insurance? Well, because you have bad injuries or you miss time from work and you're a high earner. They may not have enough to cover you. You got to remember. State of Louisiana's policy is only $15,000. I don't know if you've been to that emergency room lately or gone take an ambulance ride, but your average ambulance ride is $2,500. Your average emergency room visit in my career it used to be $1,500, $2,000. Now that's ballooned to $5,000, $7,500. They start running CT scans, x-rays. That whole nine yards can be ten thousand dollars, so a fifteen thousand dollar policy will not go very far.

Speaker 1:

All right, let me tell you about sarah first. And so she was driving on interstate 10. It was stop and go traffic and somebody thought that the traffic was clearing up and started going fast behind her, probably looking down, texting and driving. She comes to a stop and boom, he nails her from the back. Her car is really messed up. The guy has $15,000 of coverage. She's got got real bad neck pain. She had a history of having some neck pain five, 10 years before, but had it pretty much at ease. And she starts suffering again. I start digging. She doesn't have uninsured motorist coverage, but she was driving her father's vehicle with permission and he had a $300,000 uninsured motorist coverage policy on that vehicle. So Not only were we able to get her compensated, we got the other person's insurance settled that case.

Speaker 1:

Then we went after the uninsured motorist coverage. She was able to treat over a span of probably two or three years. Anytime she would start having more neck pain, she'd go to the doctor. The doctor would do something for her, whether it was medication or some type of trigger point injection or even an epidural steroid injection to make her feel better for the next period of time. I would take those medicals, I would send it to the uninsured motorist coverage carrier, the insurance company, and they would send us a check. She was getting basically mailbox money for having that uninsured motorist coverage and, look, she collected over six figures. That's great. But more importantly, she was able to treat for her injuries and get the care that she needed because her father had the foresight to get uninsured motorists on the vehicle.

Speaker 1:

That's another thing that we should probably mention right now is if I get uninsured motorist coverage, it follows me in any vehicle that I'm in, even when I'm in an Uber or when I'm with a friend, I'm covered and it also covers my family and all my passengers when they're in my vehicle and if I give permission to someone else to drive my vehicle. Like I recently went out of town on a nice trip and my assistant brought my kids a couple of different places, that truck is fully insured. If something happened to to to my family, they were covered with uninsured motorist coverage. It's a great deal. Something else to know about uninsured motorist coverage is you're actually presumed to have it. The insurance company actually makes you sign a rejection form because it's public policy that the state really wants you to have it. The insurance company doesn't, so they make you sign a rejection form. Now your, your insurance agent will probably say, hey, just, you want to reduce your premiums. Yeah, yeah, who doesn't want cheaper insurance premiums? Just sign here, here and here. Okay, well, you just waived what I believe is the most important thing in the policy.

Speaker 1:

I'm not worried about my liability, I'm not worried about the actions of my wife, because we're safe drivers. We're gonna. We're gonna be a tenant to. We're not gonna go out at crazy times. We're not. We're gonna be defensive, we're gonna wait at lights. That's what most people worry about is their liability as to other people, as to the, to the, to the harm they cause. What I'm more concerned about is the harm that others can cause my family. I can't afford to be hurt in a wreck. I can't afford to be out a long time away from work because I have a lot of practice to manage, so I want to protect myself financially from the acts of other people.

Speaker 1:

Let me give you another scenario. Robert, good guy, great guy. He's driving along his merry own way, going straight on a two-lane highway. Somebody runs a stoplight and t-bones him bam right in the side he and his wife. So we get the insurance information. The other driver has a decent policy. But Robert needs a shoulder surgery. His wife needs a shoulder surgery. They both have problems with their spine, like herniations. They need therapy, they need injections. They went to the emergency room.

Speaker 1:

You know you won't. If you've never been in a wreck, you don't really think how badly people can be injured in a wreck. But we know people die in wrecks every day and we know that these are thousand pounds of vehicles colliding at high speed. The human body is just not meant to take that type of impact. So you have all kinds of issues. I can't tell you how many knee surgeries I've seen, how many ankle surgeries, shoulder surgeries, neck back surgeries. People get messed up when it comes to wrecks.

Speaker 1:

And so Robert pulls his insurance information. We look at it and he had an economic only, uninsured motorist policy. So his insurance company, allstate, made him sign a form that said he only wanted economic only uninsured motorists. That's not full UM. That's what I call the Diet Coke version, the fake version. The Diet Coke version, the fake version. And so he thought he was protected and he's still paying, and he had a big policy, but he had economic only. Well, what does that mean? So we get the first policy. It was $50,000, but shoulder surgery, herniations, all the stuff that I'm describing, that's worth a lot more than $50,000. So we go into the second level, but all we could get is his actual medical bills, the actual economic only bills. So he wasn't destroyed economically because his bills were able to get paid. He was able to get treatment and basically reimbursed for that treatment, but he wasn't able to recover for his pain and suffering like he should have been had he had a full UM policy. Okay, do not get economic only coverage. It's trash. It's better than nothing, but it's not as good as the full UM, and you're really talking about just this, much more for the full UM.

Speaker 1:

Let me give you a third scenario Michael. Michael was driving a motorcycle. He's in a roundabout. Michael was driving a motorcycle. He's in a roundabout. Another vehicle fails to yield, hits him off his bike, he breaks an ankle, he has road rash from the top of his head to the bottom of his body and he's in significant pain and he gets rushed in an ambulance to the emergency room. The other vehicle ran. No one got the license plate, there was no camera footage, nothing. So guess what? No insurance there? They probably ran because they didn't have insurance. Either. When you see a hit and run, the most likely cause of that is they have a warrant for their arrest and so they don't want any interaction with the cops, or they have no insurance and so they don't want to deal with the ticket and the repercussions coming from that. We check his policy, wouldn't you know?

Speaker 1:

Two weeks before the wreck he canceled his uninsured motorist coverage. He was going through some financial hardship and that was one way of saving a little money. What's going to happen to Michael? Michael's going to have to eat all of the medical bills. He's going to have to eat the time that he was away from work. He's going to have to. He's going to get nothing for his pain and suffering, all the crap that he has gone through dealing with this wreck and recovering, and the therapy and the hours of pain and agony, the sleepless nights, just everything that is associated with it. I don't have enough time on this podcast to really fully articulate everything that this man has to go through. He will get nothing because he did not get uninsured motorist coverage. He had it but he canceled it. So you know, although he was going through financial hardship, it really doesn't. It's kind of counterintuitive. But when you are, when you are financially insecure, that's all the more reason to get uninsured motorist coverage.

Speaker 1:

So because if something does happen to you, it's not going to be catastrophic, you can call a lawyer like me and we can get you some recovery and put some money in your bank account at least take care of all these mounting bills and help get you some money from the time that you were off of work, right. And so those are three separate scenarios. One person was able the person had full UM was able to get six figures in their pocket. Tremendous medical care, happy client waving the banner. The second one was able to get five figures in their pocket. Wasn't catastrophic, right? But by no means were they fully compensated for what they went through. The third scenario, where the person had no UM whatsoever catastrophic Going to be paying off medical bills for a long time may have to declare bankruptcy to prevent some of these medical vendors from coming after him because he made a poor decision. I can't blame him because he didn't know any better and he thought that was an easy way to save some money, but it's going to be catastrophic for him and I hate telling this story, but it's a cautionary tale.

Speaker 1:

Okay, you always want to get uninsured motorist coverage, not economic only. If you are unsure of it, call your agent today and say do I have uninsured motorist coverage and is it the full UM, not the economic only? If they say no, you say I want to add it immediately, send me the form, let's do the paperwork. It's really not that much more. It's really not that much more on your policy. The majority of the stuff that you're paying, it's just a little bit more. You're paying for the liability and the collision and all that good stuff, you just need to pay a little bit more, because then that offers you protection when somebody else's bad acts affect you. And as I close this episode, I want you to know I am not an insurance salesman. I'm always thinking about you guys. I want you to protect yourselves. I want you to protect your family. All right, take care of yourselves. Add Uninsured Motorist coverage. Hope you enjoyed the episode.

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