On January 28, 2016, at approximately 12:28 p.m., one of our clients was a properly restrained passenger in a vehicle that was travelling in the right-hand lane when another motorist was leaving a Shell Parking lot and attempted to turn left in front of our client. The motorist failed to yield the right of way of the vehicle in which our client was traveling causing the two vehicles to collide. Our client was transported by ambulance to the hospital for treatment of a wrist fracture.
Our client suffered several serious wrist fractures as a result of the collision. Even though the recovery was expected to take only a year, the pain and stiffness were expected to last for at least 2 years, if not permanently. Such injuries usually last for quite a while, especially for traumatic injuries like car crashes, in patients 50 years or older, or in patients who have osteoarthritis. Our client met two of the three qualifications for permanent injury: she was older than 50 years of age and she was injured in a traumatic high-energy collision.
While she could use her arm, and do many things that she did before, her ability to use her right hand and wrist was limited by stiffness in her fingers and intermittent pain. Our client was expected to be bound to a lifetime of circumferential pain in her wrist and stiffness in her fingers. Her total medical expenses were $58,000.
Brandon Osterbind and our personal injury team worked with our client to help her obtain a timely $100,000 settlement for her wrist fracture.
This settlement did not represent the full value of this case, but it represents a policy limits settlement. This means that the defendant had an insurance policy that would only pay up to $100,000 per person for any one accident. Often times, we also request insurance policy limits from our client because, if the defendant is underinsured, we will make a claim for the additional underinsured motorist coverage over the defendant’s policy limits. In this case, our client’s policy limits did not apply in this case because it didn’t exceed the defendant’s $100,000 policy.
If you or someone you know has been involved in a car accident, contact us to discuss your injuries.
The Virginia State Bar requires that we give a disclaimer whenever we talk about case results. As we are sure you already know, the case result described above must be read in context with the unique facts of this particular case. Each case result depends upon a variety of factors unique to each case, which is why we describe those facts in detail. To be clear, this case result does not guarantee or predict a similar result in any future case undertaken by the lawyers at Osterbind Law, PLLC.
