Uninsured & Underinsured Motorist Claims
Most people have no idea they are insured against the driver who hit them.
If a driver injures you and carries too little insurance to cover what you lost — or carries none at all — your own auto policy may owe you the difference. That coverage is called uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage. It is the most valuable provision in a standard auto policy and the least understood.
It is also the coverage insurers fight hardest, because the moment you claim it you are no longer the customer. You are the claimant, and your own insurance company is now the opposing party.
The signature that ends most underinsured claims
Here is how it happens. The at-fault driver's insurer offers its policy limits, which sounds like good news. You accept and sign the release. And in doing so you extinguish your own underinsured motorist claim — because your insurer's right to pursue the at-fault driver died with that release.
Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia each have a procedure for accepting the at-fault driver's limits without destroying the underinsured claim. In Maryland it is a statutory notice-and-consent process: written notice to your own carrier, which then has a limited window to consent or to pay you the amount of the tender itself and preserve its subrogation rights. Miss the notice, or sign the release before the window runs, and the claim is gone. There is no fixing it afterward.
What we do
- Find every policy. Coverage may exist under your policy, a household member's policy, a policy on the vehicle you were riding in, an employer's policy, or an umbrella policy sitting above any of them. Clients routinely have two or three layers they do not know about.
- Protect the claim before accepting anything. We give the statutory notice and get consent in writing before any release is signed.
- Read the policy, not the adjuster's summary. Anti-stacking language, household exclusions, residency requirements, and offset provisions are where these claims are won and lost. We have litigated all of them.
- Sue your own insurer when it will not pay. An underinsured claim the carrier refuses is a breach of contract action, and we file it.
Two of our results
$500,000. Our client was struck on an interstate highway. The at-fault driver carried $100,000 in liability coverage, which was tendered in full. Our client's own policy carried $250,000 in underinsured coverage plus a $1 million umbrella layer. We followed the statutory notice-and-consent procedure to accept the tender without forfeiting the underinsured claim, and when our client's own insurer would not pay what it owed, we sued it.
$515,000. A driver who injured our client on a bicycle carried only $25,000. We pursued the claim through our client's own underinsured coverage, litigated the insurer's coverage defenses, and recovered more than twenty times the at-fault driver's limits.
These case results are examples of matters handled by Posey Lebowitz PLLC. The outcome of any case depends on the specific facts and legal circumstances of that case. These results do not guarantee or predict a similar result in any future matter. Amounts shown are gross recoveries before attorney's fees, case expenses, and medical liens. Asset values are stated as of 2026 and will change.
If you take one thing from this page
Do not sign a release from the at-fault driver's insurer until someone has checked your own coverage. Call us first. There is no charge for the call, and it is the single decision most likely to determine what your case is worth.
More than $32 million recovered.
Plus more than $22 million in other assets.
Across more than 250 matters, in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.