Underinsured Policy To Protect You In Case Of Wrongful Death Lawsuit
If you or a loved one is killed in a car accident and the other person only has minimum insurance in Illinois you will have a problem. You of course could file a wrongful death lawsuit but you need to be able to have some asset to go after if you receive a large verdict. The minimums in Illinois are $20,000 per person with a $40,000 per accident maximum. That means if there are four people in your automobile and they are all killed their estates can only get $40,000 split four ways to cover the loss of all four people. $10,000 per person would probably not even cover their funeral expenses.
So in order to avoid this what you should do is make sure your underinsured coverage is very high. Underinsured coverage pays you and your family when involved in an car accident with a driver who does not have adequate insurance coverage. In the example I gave above, if you have an underinsurance policy of $400,000 in place, than each person killed would be able to collect $110,000 per person as opposed to just the $10,000 per person--assuming a verdict larger then $440,000.
