I have to confess, the title of this post is a bit misleading. I'm not actually going to tell you how to write an e-mail worth $110,000.00. If I did that, you wouldn't need me. However, I want to use a recent case example as an illustration for how important a good attorney, who understands the intricacies of insurance policies and the inner workings of insurance companies, can be to your case as a whole.

We recently obtained a large, six-figure settlement for a client who was involved in a motor vehicle collision. That six-figure settlement did not fully compensate her for the injuries she sustained in that collision. Fortunately, she was entitled to benefits under her own Underinsured Motorist coverage. The importance of underinsured motorist coverage in your automobile policy will be a blog post in and of itself, but the general way a UIM policy works is that when someone else causes injuries which are not your fault, and their insurer pays the full value of its policy to you, you are then entitled to pursue additional coverage from your own insurance company as long as you carry underinsured motorist coverage.

In this case, we obtained the full policy limit from the at-fault party, then we put together a demand package for the $25,000.00 from the UIM carrier. The UIM carrier responded that they would pay nothing. In fact, they said that even if they were the primary carrier on the case, they would pay only $14,847.90. They completely denied our client, claiming that she had been more than fully compensated by receiving six-figures from the at-fault party.

Upon receiving this e-mail, I took steps designed to put the insurance company and its representatives in a very difficult position. I began to frame the case, through one e-mail, as one which would be litigated, which would involve numerous depositions of the insurance company representatives where they would need to explain their answers to the pointed questions in that email (or explain why they didn't answer them at all). This one e-mail most likely took me over an hour to draft. However, once it was received, the insurance company quickly reversed course and offered the full value of their UIM policy, representing a complete reversal of value consideration of over $110,000.00.

Examples like this are what makes a good lawyer worth every penny. Most lawyers would likely have told their client that the company denied the claim and to move on with their life. That kind of advice is never in the cards for us when our client is entitled to benefits which are wrongfully being denied.