http://www.727injury.com (727) 381-2300 St Petersburg Personal Injury Attorneys McQuaid & Douglas

How is COVID-19 affecting personal injury cases? Hi, everyone as you know, I'm Sean McQuaid and it has been some time since I've done a video. One reason was I was uncertain as to how appropriate it was during the lockdown and secondly, like probably many other people, I just didn't have all that much motivation to film the video. So in any event, we are now back, it is the week of May 4th, 2020 and governor DeSantis has partially lifted the stay at home orders. And so now we're seeing gradual reopening. Uh, and so I felt it was appropriate to give a status on what we're seeing on the front lines here of personal injury law. Uh, obviously it's not quite as uh, as severe or significant as the front lines of the covert 19 crisis. But still, uh, throughout the past almost two months, uh, we've seen a lot of changes in how, uh, personal injury cases are being handled.

And so hopefully this video provide some insight as to what we're dealing with and what you might be dealing with. Uh, if you have a pending case or if you get into some type of accident and you're wondering what's going on. So, uh, first, uh, we saw toward the end of March, so right when the pandemic was starting, uh, right around the time that the shutdown was, was first occurring, we saw really a, um, a boom of settlement of personal injury cases. People were motivated, meaning clients were motivated to get the cases done, insurance adjusters were also motivated, uh, and the offers were still good. And so I'd say for the last two, two and a half, three weeks, end of March, uh, very beginning of April, boom of cases resolved. And that was really as a reason. Uh, part of the reason was there were no new client calls, no new, uh, client intakes.

We were just solely working on settlements. And we've got a lot done now that changed in April and it's changed all the way up to today's date. And what we've noticed is a tightening of the insurance, uh, of the insurance companies. And this happened. We noticed it, like I said, maybe the first week of April where offers were coming in that were bizarre to us. Um, and so there had to have been some type of pullback by the insurance companies. So what we've seen over the past say five, five and a half weeks is if a case is clearly an excess of the insurance policy, they're still tendering those policies. There's no issue there. But on every other case where the claim is questionable as to whether it meets or exceeds the policy limits, we are getting ridiculous low ball offers. I mean inexcusable offers, uh, and virtually it's across the board.

Doesn't matter. The insurance company, uh, I'm not quite sure exactly why. I think I've got some suspicions. I think it's because they believe that people are desperate for money and they're uncertain about what their income is going to be in terms of whether people continue to pay their insurance premiums. But it's been low ball after low ball and it's really been disturbing. As far as the, uh, the claim processing, the insurance companies were well-suited due to the, um, to deal with the shutdown. A lot of the insurance adjusters are working from home, so we really didn't see much of a slow down or a delay. Uh, we are told that new claims coming in are, are, are off dramatically. We've seen that here at the office. We've only had a few cases trickle in here and there. And so I know the insurance adjusters are not being overworked, they're just tight.

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