If you were injured and have a claim against your insurance policy for damages, your insurance company should follow the policy. They are not allowed to deny coverage for reasons outside the policy, and they even have a duty to make a good-faith effort to pay you. If they don’t, we can take them to court.
Claims can be based on a simple breach of contract if the insurance company is making a mistake. However, more serious claims where they cancel your policy, give you the runaround, or otherwise try to deny the claim for inappropriate reasons might even lead to “bad faith insurance” claims and get you additional damages.
For help with your case, call the Rhatigan Law Offices’ Illinois personal injury lawyers at (312) 578-8502 today.
Grounds to Sue Your Insurance Company for Denials
When you get hurt and have a claim against your own insurance company for damages, the claim is based on your insurance policy. This is a contract between you and the insurance company detailing what they need to cover and how much they need to pay. If they don’t pay as they are supposed to, you have a case, but the grounds might change.
Breach of Contract
Simple breach of contract cases can be filed against your insurance company if they violated a term of the contract. This usually means doing something accidentally or making a small oversight they thought they could get away with, rather than anything really bad.
The damages in a breach of contract case are usually limited to what the insurance company should have paid you in the first place.
Bad Faith Insurance
If the insurance company goes beyond violating the policy and actually tries to get out of paying something they are supposed to pay, they could be liable for bad faith insurance.
This claim focuses on their duty to make a good-faith effort to pay valid claims. When insurance companies never intended to pay in the first place, they violate that duty and can be made to pay even more than the base value of the claim as punishment.
What Insurance Companies Can You Sue?
Our Chicago, IL personal injury lawyers help injury victims get compensation from whatever source, whether that be the defendant or their own insurance. When we talk about suing an insurance company for breach of contract or bad faith, we are usually talking about suing your own insurance company.
The insurance policy is a contract, and you need to be an actual signatory to the contract to sue the insurance company for not carrying out its terms. These cases are usually filed for car insurance claims where your insurance refuses to cover medical payments, collision coverage, or uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage. However, you can also sue other insurance companies, like your homeowners insurance, if they refuse to cover you.
You can also sue your insurance company if they refuse to cover the damages you cause someone else, but that is usually outside of our practice, since we represent injury victims.
If you are concerned about the defendant’s insurance company denying your damages for the injuries they caused you, we can usually handle that in a traditional lawsuit against the defendant. That insurance company doesn’t work for you in the first place, so bad faith insurance claims are usually not applicable.
What Constitutes Bad Faith Insurance?
Bad faith insurance is usually more than mere mistakes. The procedures and processes of filing an insurance claim are long and drawn-out, even when they are working correctly. Insurance companies get opportunities to investigate, delay claims, and make decisions slowly. Bad faith insurance usually takes more obvious bad actions.
Common examples include signs that the insurance company was never going to pay you in the first place, such as these:
- Cancelling your policy after you made your claim
- Claiming you are behind on premiums when you are not
- “Losing” your initial claim and making you start over
- Denying that you have a policy in the first place
- Refusing to answer your calls or communications
- Refusing to send you status reports and required update letters
- Refusing to investigate the claim
- Refusing to pay after accepting your claim.
Damages for Bad Faith Insurance Cases in Illinois
When you get hurt, you need damages for medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering. Your insurance company might not have to pay all of these, and your case revolves around only the covered damages. For example, if you are seeking medpay damages from your car insurance, that will only cover certain medical bills.
These damages are essentially the value of the insurance claim, and that should always be paid at full value when you win a bad faith insurance claim or a breach of contract claim. There are no additional damages paid on top of this to account for additional injury costs; the insurance company only pays what the policy says they pay.
However, the fact that the insurance company gave you the runaround, lied to you, delayed your claim, etc. can lead to two additional areas of damages:
- Interest makes up for the delay and compounds the longer they delay.
- Punitive damages separately punish the defendant for their bad actions. These damages are not even based on the harm you faced, but rather how much it takes to punish the defendant and deter future bad actions.
Punitive Damages Rules for Bad Faith Insurance Claims
To prove punitive damages should be paid, you have to show by “clear and convincing evidence” that the defendant had “evil motive” or “reckless and outrageous indifference to” your rights. This essentially means showing that it was obvious that they knew what they were doing was illegal, and went ahead with denying your claim anyway.
The earlier you get us on your case, the earlier we can act to send demand letters and create a clear paper trail that the insurance company was notified that they were acting in bad faith, and then kept going.
Another thing to know is that Illinois law caps punitive damages at three times the value of the rest of the economic damages in the case.
Call Our Personal Injury Lawyers in Illinois Today
For help getting your injury claim paid, even from a bad faith insurance company, call the Rhatigan Law Offices’ Evanston, IL personal injury lawyers at (312) 578-8502 today.
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