http://www.727injury.com (727) 381-2300 St Petersburg Personal Injury Attorneys McQuaid & Douglas
The topic of this video is what do you do if the other driver won't provide insurance information? So here's the scenario. You are hit by another driver on the road and you are injured. That other driver is investigated. The other driver did not provide proof of insurance to the police officer. Maybe they made up a story, maybe they just simply left it at home after the fact. You then have property damage to your vehicle and you have an injury to your, to your body that you're treating for and trying to recover. In the meantime, you've reported the accident to your insurance company and you've asked your insurance company over and over, Hey, what's the story with the other driver? Your insurance adjuster replies to you and says, we can't get ahold of them. We don't know because there's no, uh, there's no proof of insurance on the drivers exchange information that was left at the scene.
So what do you do? And those situations, what are your options? So what I suggest to my clients, the first thing to do is to pull the full accident report, see if the driver of the vehicle subsequently reported to the officer and gave him or her is uh, his insurance information. However, that's probably unlikely if they didn't have it at the scene, it's unlikely that they would have given it to the officer shortly after the fact. Right. So, uh, the next step in the process, if you're against scrambling to try to find proof of insurance, is to see if that person was actually cited with proof of insurance as well. So there'll be a separate citation that the officer would have issued. If you see that in the public records and you can find that in the clerk of whatever county you're in, make sure just double check that that proof of the no proof of insurance citation was filed.
So the next step in the process, you can actually request from the department of motor vehicles proof that that driver was insured, right? So if they had a car, that car should have been insured. So you can send off a request for the, uh, either the driver or that, uh, that car to see who's actually insuring it and DMV will respond back. So that's, that's the second way. Now, the last way is to simply file a lawsuit. You can sue the person, bring them in, try to get them under oath and ask them under oath, Hey, did you have insurance? And with what company? Now again, that's not always, uh, a preferred method. In fact, I've never done that just to find, uh, insurance information. But it's an option in an extreme case. Now, realistically, what should you be doing while you're trying to find that insurance information?
You need to, you need to continue to cooperate with your own insurance company, have your own insurance company try to make the, or make the appropriate repairs. You can still bill through your pip insurance. Um, and hopefully you've got some uninsured motorist coverage. Because yes, what common sense tells you if that person was not cooperating and providing their insurance information, it's probably because they didn't have insurance, right? I mean, think about it at the end of the day. Uh, so, uh, that person is probably uninsured. And so your, your best bet at recovering compensation at the end of the day is to look at your own uninsured motorist coverage. So hopefully you have that and you were responsible and a, and thought ahead about that. So, in any event, we run into these situations, uh, occasionally, uh, they're usually with irresponsible people on the other side that don't have insurance. Uh, but hopefully now that you understand options, if in fact you're having trouble getting that other person's insurance information.
*The above has been transcribed by a third party service and has not been checked for accuracy
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