Subrogation is an idea that's well-known in insurance and legal circles but often not by the customers who hire them. Rather than leave it to the professionals, it would be to your advantage to comprehend an overview of how it works. The more information you have about it, the better decisions you can make with regard to your insurance company.

Every insurance policy you own is an assurance that, if something bad happens to you, the business that insures the policy will make good in one way or another without unreasonable delay. If you get an injury while working, your company's workers compensation agrees to pay for medical services. Employment lawyers handle the details; you just get fixed up.

But since ascertaining who is financially responsible for services or repairs is sometimes a heavily involved affair – and time spent waiting sometimes increases the damage to the policyholder – insurance companies often decide to pay up front and assign blame afterward. They then need a method to recover the costs if, ultimately, they weren't actually in charge of the expense.

For Example

Your kitchen catches fire and causes $10,000 in house damages. Luckily, you have property insurance and it takes care of the repair expenses. However, the assessor assigned to your case finds out that an electrician had installed some faulty wiring, and there is a decent chance that a judge would find him accountable for the loss. You already have your money, but your insurance agency is out $10,000. What does the agency do next?

How Subrogation Works

This is where subrogation comes in. It is the process that an insurance company uses to claim reimbursement after it has paid for something that should have been paid by some other entity. Some insurance firms have in-house property damage lawyers and personal injury attorneys, or a department dedicated to subrogation; others contract with a law firm. Usually, only you can sue for damages done to your person or property. But under subrogation law, your insurance company is given some of your rights for making good on the damages. It can go after the money that was originally due to you, because it has covered the amount already.

Why Should I Care?

For starters, if your insurance policy stipulated a deductible, your insurance company wasn't the only one who had to pay. In a $10,000 accident with a $1,000 deductible, you lost some money too – to the tune of $1,000. If your insurance company is timid on any subrogation case it might not win, it might opt to get back its costs by increasing your premiums. On the other hand, if it has a knowledgeable legal team and goes after them aggressively, it is acting both in its own interests and in yours. If all $10,000 is recovered, you will get your full deductible back. If it recovers half (for instance, in a case where you are found one-half responsible), you'll typically get half your deductible back, based on the laws in most states.

Furthermore, if the total price of an accident is more than your maximum coverage amount, you may have had to pay the difference, which can be extremely spendy. If your insurance company or its property damage lawyers, such as family law lacey wa, successfully press a subrogation case, it will recover your costs as well as its own.

All insurers are not the same. When comparing, it's worth looking at the reputations of competing agencies to find out if they pursue winnable subrogation claims; if they do so fast; if they keep their accountholders updated as the case goes on; and if they then process successfully won reimbursements right away so that you can get your funding back and move on with your life. If, on the other hand, an insurer has a reputation of paying out claims that aren't its responsibility and then covering its profitability by raising your premiums, you'll feel the sting later.