By Josh Chetwynd
When a client is a party to a lawsuit, insurance companies in Maryland must now divulge the amount of coverage a client possesses immediately under certain circumstances, according to a new Maryland law.
The law, which went into effect Oct. 1, allows a person suing in a vehicle accident to compel the defendant to provide “the insurer documentation of the applicable limits of coverage in any insurance agreement under which the insurer may be liable to” either “satisfy all or part of the claim” or “indemnify or reimburse for payments made to satisfy the claim.”
Previously, the law allowed insurance companies to withhold disclosure of coverage limits until they’d first collected $12,500 in medical bills and records, according to Ronald V. Miller, Jr., an attorney at the Baltimore-based Miller & Zois.
In a blog posting for the Maryland Injury Lawsuit Information Center, Miller argued that any streamlining of this process is a good thing not only for plaintiffs’ lawyers but also insurance companies.
“In spite of what people think, [early disclosure] actually saves the insurance company money, because keeping files open means someone has to monitor those files,” he wrote. “Now insurance companies are obligated to disclose their policy limits upon reasonable request and everyone is better off for it.”
