INJURY CAUSED BY A DRIVER WITH NO INSURANCE OR HIT/SKIP

Most drivers who ignore and evade our mandatory insurance coverage laws or who are sufficiently callous to speed away from an injury accident they caused, also have no assets from which to recover damages. You do have remedies.

First, obtain an accident report form from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles safety responsibility division. If the identity of the other driver is known you can cause his or her license to be suspended till he pays up.

Second, get out your own auto insurance policy; look at the “declarations page” to see whether you bought insurance to protect you against an uninsured motorist. Even if you don’t have such coverage, if you were a passenger in a car driven by someone whose policy had uninsured motorist protection you are probably covered. Also if you lived with a relative at the date of the wreck you may have coverage under that relative’s auto policy.

A collision with a hit/skip driver is the same thing for insurance purposes as a collision with an uninsured driver. The available coverage extends as well to injury and damage caused by an under insured driver, i.e. someone who, though having required insurance has the state minimum or some other amount less than you have.

Because few people understand insurance policy language and you are foolish to entrust the interpretation of your coverage to your insurance agent or claims adjuster (who are they working for? – Not you!

Talk free of charge to a lawyer well versed in auto insurance coverage and experienced in claim valuation. Finally, don’t be intimidated from a claim because of the imagined specter of rate increase, rates are influenced by many factors but a claim arising from a wreck not your fault is not one of them.