Finding Insurance Coverage When Attorney #1 Gave Upby Chuck Boyk

In August 2024 an attorney friend put me in touch with his corporate client. The corporate client was concerned that his friend/former employee, an Ohio resident, was injured in a catastrophic injury crash in Michigan. The injured person was unconscious and on a vent in a Toledo hospital. She had been hospitalized for weeks. I was put in touch with the injured person’s mother who was handling the situation. The mother informed me that she had hired a very prominent Michigan attorney who was handling the case. It turned out that the mother was my old high school classmate and I wished her and her daughter good luck.

Several months later the mother texted me and requested I call her. The Michigan attorney had terminated his representation because of “an insurance issue” that prevented the client from pursuing a personal injury claim in Michigan. I offered to take the case and get a definitive answer on whether a claim could be presented under Michigan law.

The facts were clear. The “corporate” defendant rear-ended the plaintiff’s car going 75 miles per hour. The client ended up being hospitalized for over 6 months, suffered numerous serious injuries, multiple surgeries, and the issue was whether she would ever walk again. The “problem” was that the plaintiff had sold her first car several years ago. She obtained a new car and never told her insurance agent. She continued to “insure” the sold car. Michigan has a statute that denies a plaintiff the right to pursue a personal injury claim unless the vehicle owned in the crash was “insured.” In this case the plaintiff had insurance on the “sold car” but not on the “new car.”

I presented the problem to our superstar law clerk Angela Hanna. The first attorney, the winner of dozens of multi-million dollar verdicts and settlements, could not find a viable claim. I instructed Angela to figure out an exception to the law and at least some argument we could make in good faith. A few days later Angela came to my office with a huge smile. She found a 2004
Michigan Court of Appeals case that created an exception to pursue a Michigan noneconomic damage claim if the plaintiff was a nonresident of Michigan.

We presented a memo (Angela’s work product) to the tortfeasor’s insurance carrier and they grudgingly accepted that we were presenting a viable claim. We went through 4 different insurance policies and finally concluded that only 1 of the policies covered the crash. Though the settlement was inadequate, we were able to recover the $250,000 policy limits for our client.

The learning lesson is: 1) Never give up until you have exhausted all possible legal research, and 2) Hire a law clerk who is smarter than you.