The Coverage Your Insurance Hopes You Never Find

This is about to be the most boring crash you will ever watch. It's a cold January morning, little rear ender, nobody's hurt, and the officer could not be nicer about it. He tells the guy who got hit the same thing you'd expect. Hey, just call your insurance. They'll hash it out between them. Everybody just go home. Sounds like it's handled, right? Well, except the officer is about to run the other driver's license, and what he finds is the exact thing that can leave the innocent guy in this video paying for the whole thing out of his own pocket. So watch this one closely, because the crash that looks like nothing is the one that gets people. I'm Justin Lovely, a personal injury attorney here in South Carolina, and my office has settled thousands of accident cases. Now, right up front, this one's out of state. You'll hear him say Lockport, Will County Courthouse. And hey, that's in Illinois. That's not our South Carolina law. So I'm not going to sit here and pretend I worked this file, but the lessons in it, the lessons travel. This is the same quiet trap that I watch get sprung on good people here in South Carolina all the time. So let's watch how normal this looks, and then I'm going to show you the part nobody's thinking about. Here's the situation. Guy's driving to school. He gets rear-ended. No big deal. Officer shows up. Everybody's polite. It's freezing outside, so he's telling folks to go sit in their cars and stay warm. This is the friendliest crash scene you're ever going to see. Watch how routine it all feels. Hello, everybody. Hello, sir. Good. No one's hurt, right? No, no one's hurt. All right. I know you guys explained it to him because it happened on the actual roadway. I'm the one that's got to write it up. Give me the rundown of what happened, if you don't mind. We were just, I turned on the road, just driving. I was going on the way to school. Okay. And then I was driving, Okay. And were you going straight or were you turning? I was going straight. Okay. All right. So you guys were both just going this way down the street. Okay. Okay. So far, this is the easiest case in the world. He got rear-ended going straight. In almost every rear-end accident, the driver in the back is at fault, and this guy's the innocent one. He's thinking his whole job is done. Now watch what the officer tells him to do about it. Cool. We will get it all written up. And I'm sure if he didn't tell you, everything's digital now. So we'll give you a sheet with the crash report number and all that good stuff. You guys just call your insurance companies and they can hash it out between one another. There it is, that one sentence. Just call your insurance companies. They'll hash it out. That is what almost everybody in America believes about a car wreck. Two cars, two insurance companies, they fight it out. You stay out of it. You get taken care of. And look, when it works, that's exactly how it goes. But that whole idea rests on one thing nobody's checked yet. It assumes the other guy actually has an insurance company to hash everything out with. So keep your eyes right there while we watch the rest, not on the dented bumper, on whether there's any coverage on the other side of this at all. So like I said, everything's digital. Just call your insurance company. Let them know what happened. Your mom and dad will call. You're not listed as the at-fault unit or anything. You got rear-ended. That is what it is. Yeah, questions? No, no. Okay, cool. All right, dude. So do you know your license is suspended? It is? It is. It's for financial reasons. It doesn't give me exact, so it's probably like unpaid tickets or something like that. Okay. Okay. And there's the turn. Suspended license. For financial reasons. Unpaid tickets. Now, why on earth does a personal injury lawyer perk up at that? The guy who got hit sure didn't. He's still sitting in his warm car thinking insurance has got it under control. But I heard that and my stomach dropped for the innocent driver. Let me tell you why. So what's gonna happen, and this isn't a me rule, this is just, it is what it is because of the status of your license is I have to tow your car. Tow it to my house? No, tow it to a tow yard because it's, you're driving without a valid license. Okay. Okay. You're not gonna go to the station. You're not gonna be putting handcuffs or anything like that. You're gonna get a ticket for driving with your license while it's in this status. Okay. And you'll have to show up to that. But otherwise, like, everything's normal. Okay. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. Here's the thing. Call your insurance and they'll hash it out between one another. That only works if there are two of them. Two real active paid up policies. That sentence has a silent partner in it. And the silent partner is a big assumption that the other driver is insured. Most of the time, yeah, fine, they are. But a suspended license is the universe waving a flag at you. Because think about what a suspended license usually means. This guy's, he's suspended for financial reasons. He's got unpaid tickets. That is a person who is behind on paying the government. And a person who's behind on paying tickets is very often a person who's behind on paying insurance premiums too. When you can't afford the fines, the insurance is one of the first things that lapses. So play it forward. Say his insurance lapsed two months ago and nobody knows it yet at this scene. The innocent guy goes home. He waits a couple of days. Like the officer said, he calls his own insurance company. He's all relaxed. He gives them that report number. And his insurance company calls the other driver's company to go and collect. But guess what? There's no company to call. The policy's dead. Now there's nothing to hash out because one side of the each other doesn't exist. And here's the part that should make you mad. The innocent driver did everything right. He got rear ended. He wasn't at fault. He was polite. He waited. He called. And he could still end up staring at a repair bill. And if he's been hurt, he's got a medical bill with no at fault insurance anywhere to pay for it. Being right doesn't pay your deductible. Being right doesn't pay your surgeon. So when the at fault pocket is empty, where does the money come from? The same answer as always. And it's a pocket you already own. Your own car insurance. There's two pieces to it. Uninsured motorist coverage, U-M, and underinsured motorist coverage, U-I-M. Here in South Carolina, uninsured motorist coverage is required. You have it right now, whether you ever thought about it or not. And it's the coverage that steps up when the person who hits you turns out to have no valid insurance at all. Exactly like a lapse policy behind a suspended license in this video. Underinsured, the U-I-M, that's one optional coverage in South Carolina. And it's the one people cheap out on to save a few bucks a month. And then it's not there the day a driver like this comes along and there's not enough insurance. I want you to sit and think about how ordinary this was in this video. It didn't take a stolen car. It didn't take a high speed chase. It took a fender bender on the way to school on a cold Tuesday. That's all it takes to land you on your own coverage. So here's the practical piece this video hands you for free. When you're in a car wreck, do not just collect a crash report number and drive off feeling good about it. That number tells you the accident got written down. It does not tell you one single thing about whether the other driver is actually insured today. So at the scene or right after you confirm it, get the other driver's insurance card, take a picture of it and understand that a card is not the same as an active policy. So if anything feels off and a suspended license would absolutely feel off to me, you get a lawyer to verify coverage fast before the trail goes cold. The insurance company on your own side is not going to volunteer that the other guy was uninsured and that your U-M should kick in. That's on you to push for or on somebody like me to find for you. We have had clients who got rear-ended by a driver who turned out to be uninsured or driving on a suspended license just like this. They got told there was nothing there and we found the money sitting in their own U-M coverage the whole time. So here's what I want you to actually do tonight before this video leaves your head. Pull up your auto policy declarations page. Find two numbers, your U-M limit and your U-I-M limit. If you can't find them or you find them in their park at the South Carolina state minimum, call your agent this week and have a real conversation about raising them because this clip lays out the truth better than I ever could. You do not get to pick the person who hits you. You don't get to make them keep a valid license. You don't get to make them keep their insurance paid up. They can be a guy with suspended tax and elapsed policy driving to work and there's nothing you can do about that. The only piece of this you control, the only piece, is what you carry on your own policy before this ever happens. So if you've already been hit by a driver like this one in South Carolina and somebody told you there's just no insurance on the other side, there's nothing to collect, there's nothing we can do, do not take that as the final answer. That is exactly the situation where we go digging, we look into your own coverage, into your own U-M, into every pocket in the chain and we find money other people may miss. Call us today. We'll give you an honest read on what's actually there. I'm Justin Lovely and I'll see you on the next one.