Choosing the Right Lawyer is No ACCIDENT- A Personal Injury Guide - By Jeff Adelman (2025 Edition)

Choosing the Right Lawyer is No Accident
DEMAND LETTERS
Usually prior to filing a lawsuit, an attorney will send a demand letter to
the insurance company to try and get the case resolved. There are really
two types of demand letters:
1. Where policy limits are inadequate (not enough insurance to pay for
your losses)
2. When a client/patient has reached Maximum Medical Improvement,
meaning the client is as healthy and as close to the way they were before
the accident as they are going to be.
Inadequate Limits Policy Demands: This involves a serious injury with
not enough insurance coverage. As soon as it becomes obvious, such as
if the injury is a fractured wrist and there’s only a $10,000 policy of
liability coverage, I send a letter out and there’s several reasons for doing
that. The first one is if that’s all the money there is available through
insurance, you might as well go and get it. You don’t want it sitting in
the insurance company’s bank account.
Prior to accepting these policy limits, we usually do an asset search to
make sure that the person who caused the injury doesn’t have anything
that would be attachable (collectable). We also try to get an affidavit
from the owner and driver of the vehicle that there are no additional
insurance policies that potentially could cover this loss, or anything that
we could force a sale of, in the event of a judgment. But most of the time
when you’re dealing with somebody who has a $10,000 insurance policy
for liability, they’re not going to have attachable assets.
So that’s something that you have to consider. And when people say to
me, “Well, can you go after the person for more than the policy limits?”,
I tell them there’s a reason that OJ Simpson moved to Florida and it isn’t
because of the weather. To try and get assets from somebody in Florida
is very, very difficult. I previously discussed the “Homestead” rule
which basically says you can’t force somebody to sell their home
Jeff Adelman, B.C.S., Esq. 23