insurance

If your insurance company pays you a small amount for a large loss and you then sue the party who caused the loss, what complications can there be for you? Are there conflicts of interest sometimes which prevent an insurance company from pursuing subrogation? If they do pursue subrogation, do they share in paying the legal fees.? If they are also insuring those who caused the loss, will they pay out under those people's insurance?

I'm not sure we have the whole story here, but here goes. This is assuming that both you and the other party are insured by the same company.

I don't understand why you have collected from your insurance company for the loss under your policy, and then plan on suing the other party. Generally you either collect from your policy and let the insurer go after the other party, or go after the other party and leave your insurer out of it. We aren't talking an uninsured motorist here, so what type of claim could you be making? You can't collect twice for the same damage. Either way, unless your exhausted the other party's policy limits, you will have to reimburse them.

There is little chance that the insurance company will bother with subrogation against itself. And subrogation rarely requires legal fees, especially when the parties are insured and liability is clear.

Finally, as to the conflict of interests, if there is an issue regarding this, the claims department will appoint different adjusters, usually having them report to different supervisors, to handle the claim. In some states this is a requirement, both even without the law, most companies consider this protection against getting sued for bad faith claims handling.

When an insurer insures both parties in a loss, each should have its own claims rep who acts in the interest of their assigned policy holder. There should be no conflict of interest as the reps act the same as if they were dealing with another company. If it is the other person's fault, that person's policy should pay out.

Call your agent or your claim rep for reassurance on their processes - that is what they are there for.

Actually this scenario is an easy one for the claims dept.

Once negligence is proven that policy will pay in full. An insurance company --depending on the kind of claim we are talking about here can easily settle "in house" with the other "insured" . This is less paperwork as if the are subrogating against another carrier. This happens all the time and the fix is easy.

Well, ask your agent who the other carrier is. They should be able to call your adjuster and just ASK them.

There's NO complications if you sue the other party - the only issue is, YOUR company is entitled to reimbursement from whatever you get back. It's not going to hamper subrogation. legal fees will not be shared, if there's recovery, even the legal fees go against the one party fully at fault.

See, companies assign claims, and the money they pay out, against each party in accordance to fault. AND against the agent of the party at fault, so it's really important to assign the loss accurately. They don't "slack off" just because it's the same company for both parties.