After a big accident with serious injuries, the at fault driver’s insurance company may come to you quickly with an offer. It can feel like a resolution. But how do you know that offer reflects everything you are actually entitled to? That question is exactly why who you hire matters, and this week we are talking about what a specialist attorney actually does to find it all.
Why Serious Accidents Require a Specialist
There are a lot of great attorneys out there who do a little of everything. When a former client calls them about an accident case, they want to help and that impulse is understandable. But handling auto accident claims at a serious level is its own world. Think of it like a Jiffy Lube versus a full service mechanic. Both work on cars. Only one of them should be touching your transmission.
Roughly ten times a year we take on claims where someone has been substantially injured, surgery cases, sometimes multiple surgeries, cases that land in the six and seven figure range. These cases have three elements: liability, damages, and how everything gets paid for. The third column is where specialization makes the biggest difference, and it is where generalists most often fall short.
The Moving Parts Most People Do Not See
Even in a straightforward accident case, you are typically dealing with multiple medical providers, their billing departments, health insurance if the client has it, and in Maryland the right attorney should be advising clients to run things through health insurance first, plus at least two separate auto insurance companies. The injured person’s own carrier and the at fault driver’s carrier. That alone is a lot to manage correctly.
In more serious cases, there may be additional policies that nobody initially surfaces. We have had three cases in the past month alone where the at fault company offered their full limits, the underinsured motorist carrier offered their full limits, and then we kept digging and found additional coverage that would have been left on the table entirely. Cases that would have closed at $30,000 were worth significantly more because we knew where to look and how to look.
Finding Coverage Beyond the Obvious
This is the part of the job that does not get talked about enough. When someone is seriously injured, the damages can far exceed what any single policy covers. A specialist knows to search for every potential layer of coverage, including employer policies if a commercial vehicle was involved, umbrella policies, policies held by household members, and more. Right now we have active cases where we have been offered the policy limits but are still searching because the offer is nowhere near adequate given what our client has been through.
In just the past two months, finding additional coverage has increased the value of a handful of settlements by nearly half a million dollars combined. That is money that would have disappeared if someone had simply accepted the first offer and closed the file.
How to Lose Your Entire Underinsured Motorist Claim
Underinsured motorist coverage is one of the most important protections you can have, and I have talked about it many times on this podcast. What I have not gone into detail on is how easy it is to destroy that claim if you do not follow the correct process for opening it. You cannot simply call your insurance company and tell them the other driver’s policy was not enough. There are specific steps, specific notices, specific timing requirements, and if any of them are missed, the claim is gone.
Within the past year, my office handled a legal malpractice case built entirely on this mistake. An attorney who was not regularly handling auto accident cases failed to properly put the underinsured motorist carrier on notice. The result was that the client lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in coverage, money that ultimately had to come from that attorney’s malpractice insurance. This happens, and the only reliable way to prevent it is to hire someone who does this work every single day and knows every step of the process cold.
If you are watching this from outside Maryland and are looking for an injury attorney for a serious accident wherever you are, please ask the attorney you are considering how often they handle these cases and whether they have experience finding and exhausting all available coverage. The answer tells you a lot.
The 2026 Edition of Your Insurance Policy Sucks Is Almost Here
We first published this book in 2010, updated it in 2014, and the 2026 edition is rounding third. It will be available later this fall. If you have entered one of our insurance review contests, been a client of this office, or are in our contact database in any way, you will receive a copy. We will also keep a stack here at the Elkton office. Stop by and grab one at no charge, and we will pair it with a free insurance review so you have both the context and the reference in hand.
Congratulations to Our Ravens Tickets Winner
We drew the winner from our August and September insurance review contest today. Congratulations to Mark C., who wins two lower level tickets to a Ravens home game of his choice this season. We will be reaching out to Mark directly to get everything sorted. Thank you to everyone who entered. Your participation also helped us make a $500 contribution to Voices of Hope, a recovery organization that has been doing life changing work here in Cecil County for over a decade. We are proud to support them and plan to run a similar contest again twice a year going forward.
Get a Free Auto Insurance Policy Review
The contest may be over, but the free insurance review is not going anywhere. Understanding what your policy actually covers and what it does not is directly connected to what your claim is worth if you are ever seriously hurt. You can submit your declarations page at marylandinsurancebook.com for a plain English report card on your coverage with no sales pitch and no obligation. A free one on one consultation is also available if you want to walk through the scenarios in more detail.
Coming Up on the Podcast
We have a strong lineup of guests coming in the weeks ahead. We will be talking about home safety, electric vehicles and EV chargers, total loss and salvage title questions with a local body shop, and a conversation with a property and casualty insurance agent. If you have a topic you want covered, email info@bowerslawmd.com and let me know it is for the podcast. Back episodes are available at bowerslawmd.com/podcast.
Contact Our Personal Injury Lawyers Today
If you have been injured in an accident and are not sure whether you are getting everything you are entitled to, contact Bowers Law today. A consultation is free, and there is no obligation. Call us or visit bowerslawmd.com to get started.
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