The purpose of this video is to explore the relationship between an insurance defense attorney and the actual insurance company. So in an automobile accident when the at-fault driver is sued by our clients, the injured people, the lawsuit gets turned over to the insurance company and the insurance company will assign defense counsel. And so the defense counsel has an interesting relationship. It’s called the tripartite relationship, which means they have obligations to the insurance company and they also have obligations to the insured. The at fault driver. Um, ultimately the insurance company is the entity that holds the purse strings, so to speak and makes decisions on whether or not they’re going to put a certain amount of money on the case. And this can give rise to a difficult situation wherein the at fault driver, uh, might feel as if their own insurance company is not taking care of them or paying enough money to resolve the plaintiff’s case.
And in that case, there could be some bad faith implications. Uh, however, the interesting relationship is between the defense attorney and that of the insurance company and insurance adjuster. This insurance adjuster, most of the time will be a litigation adjuster. It’s not the same type of adjuster that handles the case before suit is filed because that’s a claims adjuster. The litigation adjuster puts a value on the case and oftentimes, uh, that value comes from the evaluation of the medical records. Uh, any liability issues, um, and any causation issues that they may perceive. Our job is to make that litigation’s adjustment job easy. We have to present our case clearly on behalf of our clients and present the value clearly so that litigation adjuster can look at it quickly and put the appropriate value on the case. When a lawsuit’s filed, one of the benefits to filing a lawsuit is you get another pair of eyes on the case.
The other pair of eyes is going to be the defense attorney and they’re gonna look at it from the legal standpoint. Are there liability issues? Are there causation issues? And then let’s look at the damages and the setups. And so the relationship between the defense attorney and that of the litigation adjuster is a very tight, and they’re going to be working with each other to try to ultimately resolve the case on behalf of their insured, the outfall driver, and then for our clients ultimately getting paid out on those claims that we have made and the that we brought via the lawsuit. So I hope this kind of outlines what the relationships are between the parties in a personal injury type lawsuit resulting from an auto accident.
*The above has been transcribed by a third party service and has not been checked for accuracy.
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