Wyoming Car accident laws
Your Legal Guide Wyoming Car Accidents
If you, or a loved one, have been injured in a car accident in Wyoming, this guide is for you– Learn your legal rights and responsibilities in Wyoming.
You didn’t choose to be in this situation, but now that you were injured in a car accident, you must deal with aftermath. How can you best protect yourself? How can you ensure that the medical bills are paid? What about getting compensated for your lost wages, damaged vehicle, and the rest of it?
As an attorney that handles car accident cases in Wyoming, I answer these questions every day. I talk to people in your situation. My goal with this guide is to help you understand what comes next and how to manage it. I want you to be positioned to get everything you can out of your situation and move on with your life. That is why I wrote this guide.
Quick disclaimer: Please understand how to use this information. First, everything in this guide is “most of the time” information and advice. It may not be the right information or advice for you. Your situation is unique to you. You will only get my legal advice if you hire me and we take the time to really understand your situation. Other attorneys do things differently and reasonable minds disagree. Use your common sense, and if you are in doubt about a point, talk to an attorney and get legal advice.
Also, laws and best practices change. I will do my best to update this guide.
Your Situation
You were in car accident.* You are not alone. Each year, over 2 million people are injured in a reported car accident, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In Wyoming, just over a 100 people die each year in car accidents.
The accident itself may have felt like it was happening in slow motion. You saw the other car lose control. It came into your lane. Both of you were moving, but time slowed down. Your vehicle went off the road. Totaled. You were in shock. Maybe you were taken to the hospital. Before the accident, you had plans for the next day, next week, next month. Now, those plans are on hold until you can work your way through the aftermath.
* Some plaintiffs’ attorneys refuse to use the word “accident” in these situations. They believe that characterizing an event as an accident minimizes the other driver’s responsibility. Instead, these lawyers believe, we should call it a car “wreck” to more accurately reflect the opponent’s level of culpability. I understand the argument, but disagree for two reasons. First, people commonly use the word accident without confusion. Second, the other driver probably didn’t mean to hit you or your vehicle. They may have been careless, or negligent, or a bad driver, but they probably didn’t cause the accident on purpose. If they did, that’s called vehicular assault.
TYPES OF PERSONAL INJURY
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Moving Parts in a Car Accident Case
There are a lot of moving parts for you and your attorney to track following a car accident. Among other things, to resolve an accident claim you will need to figure out the following: What is the other driver’s insurance picture? What is your insurance picture? Is there damage to your vehicle? What injuries do you have? How long will those injuries take to heal? Will the injuries fully heal? Do your injuries result in lost income? How will your injuries impact your home life, loved ones, and daily activities?
- Insurance. The other driver was required to have insurance. Hopefully, you got a copy of their insurance card at the accident scene, or their insurance information is part of a police report. Once you find this information, you will be dealing with that driver’s insurance company. If you have underinsured motorist coverage or medical payments, then you may also be dealing with your own insurance company. (I’ll explain this in more detail in the insurance section).
- Medical care. You may have gone to the hospital right away. However, injuries may have manifested over the days – and even weeks – following the accident. You will need to get the right medical care for your injuries, and it is important to do so as quickly as possible.
- Medical bills. With medical care, comes medical bills. If your treatment is first paid for by your health insurance policy, rather than the other driver’s policy, it is likely that you will end up dealing with medical liens relating to who will ultimately pay for your care.
- Vehicle repairs. Sometimes your vehicle will be repaired. Sometimes it is totaled. The insurance company should pay for a rental car while your car is being repaired or while you find a replacement. Unfortunately, this does not always happen.
- Lost wages, work. Car accidents, and any subsequent medical care, often lead to missing work for some period of time. This may mean a loss of income, because if you are not working, you are not getting paid.
- Time. Once you start playing phone tag with an insurance company, the game never ends. You are on hold; your claim is transferred, reassigned, needs approval from a supervisor, etc. The process is both time consuming and emotionally taxing.
Consulting with an Experienced Attorney
An attorney with experience handling car accident claims can assist you in working through the many pieces of this puzzle. He or she can work with your insurer and can advocate for you in talking with the other party’s insurance company and their lawyers.
The serious consequences of being in a car accident can impact your life in many important ways and over a long period of time. Therefore, it is worth taking some time to understand your case. Here is the road map of what you can expect as you navigate a car accident claim.
Understand Your Economic Harms
You may also have suffered economic harm as a result of your car accident. Types of economic harm include property damage, lost work and wages, and loss of future income. Essentially, any loss that you can quantify or hire an economist to quantify is an economic harm.
Some examples of an economic hard are: a property damage claim for damage to your vehicle; the value of airline tickets for a flight you missed as a result of the accident or your injuries; wages you did not receive because you were unable to work after the accident; and future earnings or work opportunities you would have reasonably anticipated if not for the accident.
People generally have a good idea of their economic harms once they start making a list of all the ways the accident has affected them. However, until you put a pen to paper, you may miss something. I suggest your start documenting what you have lost by making notes and keep any receipts for costs incurred that are related to the accident in any way.
Types of Insurance
Bodily Injury/Liability:
Uninsured Motorist or Underinsured Motorist Bodily Injury:
Property Damage Liability:
Medical payments (med pay):
Comprehensive:
Collision:
Umbrella:
Assume the person who hit you has a $300,000 auto bodily injury policy, a $1M umbrella, and that we can prove that the monetary value of your injuries is $500,000. In that case, you could settle for the policy limits of the auto bodily injury policy and get the remaining $200,000 from the umbrella policy.
Note: In most cases, these insurance policies do not stack. Under the example with a $300,000 bodily injury policy and $1Mumbrella, you generally cannot recover $300,000 from the bodily injury policy AND $1M from the umbrella policy for a total of $1.3M. You are limited to $1M total from both policies. Sometimes a clever attorney can find a way to stack the policies. You will not know unless you look.
Umbrella policies protect people with assets. From our previous example, assume the other driver has a $300,000 auto policy but they do not have an umbrella. Instead, they have a 401K retirement account with $200,000 in it. The insurance company can write the policy limits check for $300,000, and the injured person can go after the 401K to be made whole. Often you will not know whether they have additional assets without filing a lawsuit, hiring an investigator, or both.
Insurace Type by Driver
DRIVER 1
If Driver 1 is at fault, how much insurance is there for Driver 2 to recover?
Driver 2 can recover $25,000 from Driver 1, plus $75,000 from his own UIM policy, and possibly Med Pay.
- Liability/Bodily Injury
$100,000 Coverage
- Medical Payments
$5,000 Coverage
- Under Insured Motorist
$100,000 Coverage
DRIVER 2
If Driver 2 is at fault, how much insurance is there for Driver 1 to recover?
Driver 1 can recover $100,000 from Driver 2’s policy and possibly $5,000 from Med Pay.
- Liability/Bodily Injury
$100,000 Coverage
Liens and Medical Bills
In most car accident cases, someone has a lien against the money recovered. Typically, whoever fronts the cost of medical treatment has a lien, although a tow-truck company can also have a lien. For example, you incur $10,000 in medical bills from an accident. You have health insurance through BlueCross BlueShield of Wyoming (BCBSWY) and $5,000 in medical payments coverage through your own auto insurance carrier. When you go to the hospital for $10,000 in treatment, your health insurance policy covers $5,000 and your med pay policy covers the other $5,000. Both BCBSWY and your med pay policy will have a lien for the $5,000 that they spent on your care, assuming they did their paperwork correctly.
Let’s say your attorney gets you a settlement from the at-fault driver’s insurance company. At that point, you will likely have to repay BCBSWY and your med pay policy from the settlement proceeds. Your attorney should negotiate your lien with those parties.
If Medicare or Medicaid paid for your medical treatment, then they will have a lien even if they do not notify your attorney or the auto insurance carrier. In some horror stories, they come back years after a case settled and demand to be repaid. In my experience, dealing with Medicare or Medicaid liens adds at least six weeks to getting a case resolved.
If you have unpaid medical bills, your attorney should notify the provider and ask them to wait until the case settles for payment. There are certain laws and rules about when a hospital or medical provider can demand payment but a hospital will typically wait until a case settles before sending you to collections. If you are worried about unpaid bills after a car accident, an attorney can communicate with healthcare providers and billing companies on your behalf to notify them that a claim is ongoing and to make sure your bills will not be sent to collections.