Q: What type of attorney is needed to help with a subrogation representative to collect a debt from an auto accident?
This involves a debt being sought from an insurance company. The insurance company has paid out to their client but wants me to pay them for the accident. My insurance company denied the claim on my side due to the driver being excluded from my policy. The debt is more than I can afford.
A:
There are a number of attorneys who are capable of handling a motor vehicle accident case, particularly if no one was seriously injured. Younger, less experienced attorneys with 2-5 years of litigation experience handling automobile accident cases will be less expensive but nevertheless perfectly capable of handing such a case.
From your question, it sounds like you are the owner of the other vehicle but were not driving the other vehicle at the time of the accident. It is usually very difficult to win a case against the owner of the vehicle in such a situation. Usually, the lawsuit will be pursued against the driver of the vehicle for negligently operating the vehicle and thereby causing the accident. They can sue the owner for negligently entrusting the vehicle to an unsafe driver, but that is usually a very difficult case to prove. According to the Texas supreme court, even entrusting a vehicle to an unlicensed driver is not sufficient to establish a case of negligent entrustment because the absence of a license is not necessarily a proximate cause of a collision.
In many cases, subrogation attorneys send out demand letters, hoping to get something, but then never actually file a lawsuit because the likelihood of successfully collecting anything is quite small. I recommend sharing the information that the driver of the vehicle at the time of the accident is expressly excluded under your policy of insurance and that you lack sufficient assets to pay anything. Then wait to see if they sue you. If they do, hire a lawyer then.
A: What type of attorney? You could start with inquiries to insurance litigation attorneys - if they have subrogation experience, that would be a plus. But if you start out with that as a main criteria, you could rule out otherwise able civil litigation attorneys. Good luck
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