Last week in Colbert County, I tried a case before a jury against a big insurance company. The facts of the case were that a driver using meth, who admitted to being under the influence of meth after his drug test came back, ran a red light, t-boned, and totaled an F-150.
The owner of the F-150 had insurance with one of the largest auto insurance companies in the country. I am not going to name them because (with few exceptions) they all do this.
My client, the owner of the F-150, had full coverage insurance. He was a union worker in the building trades. They build a building, turn it over to the owners and then build the next building. He worked from job completion to job completion and has for 29 years. He had worked the year before on a project in West Virginia and was planning to go back to West Virginia to work on the same job.
His own insurance company hired a Birmingham law firm to fight him all the way to a jury trial. His insurance company claimed that because he was a union worker in the building trades and did not have an office or a factory job that he might not have any lost wages.
What a nightmare for a good, honest man who has always worked and gotten every job he applied for. We had to call his business agent to the stand to confirm that he would have “most definitely” gotten the job in West Virginia.
He had to hire a lawyer to fight his own insurance company over a case that was in no way his fault. He paid for insurance to cover his lost wages, but his insurance company hired a lawyer to keep him from getting his lost wage claim paid.
We tried the case and we won. The jury was only out about 25 minutes. Sometimes insurance companies just will not pay claims as they should.
Buckle up and drive safely because you never know!
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