When you have more than one car in an accident in Florida, you have a very big problem because the insurance company loves it.
They get one payout. And let’s just say they’ve got $20,000 in insurance, they’re going to give it to the first people who ask for it with evidence.
So you’ve got five people that got in a rear-end on I-4. The car hits one that pushes them into another that pushes them into another, and that car only had a little bit of insurance: the first one to the money gets the cash.
It’s a problem because there’s not enough.
What if a guy went off and had surgery and the next day he calls the insurance company, says, “I had a shoulder surgery at the hospital yesterday”, and there’s only $20,000, they’re going to write the $20,000, give it to that guy, and the rest of you have no luck.
So it’s important for you to find out what the insurance company is on the other side. That’s the driver exchange information sheet, that’s an onion skin.
Get your lawyer to figure out coverages. This is what big firms don’t do.
They send the letter out, they hope that it comes back in 45 days, and all of a sudden, they call and say, “Guess what, there was $20,000 and it’s already gone.”
Clients come into my office all the time. We get on the phone that day and get coverages over the phone. If they don’t give us over the phone, we fax the thing to them with follow-up phone calls, “how much is there?”
If you don’t know what’s out there, you don’t know what to do. So that’s the big risk on multi-car accidents. The second I hear somebody says, “I was in an accident and this guy t-boned me and we drove into another car that caused him to go into a wall”.
And I say, “Well, how many people are on that driver information sheet?”, and they go, “four”, we need to talk in a few minutes and we need to find out the coverages immediately.
