Car accident in Chesterfield Missouri on Long Road with questionable liability as there were conflicting witness accounts as to whether the intersection traffic light was green or had a green arrow. Our client made a left turn pursuant to a green arrow and was broad-sided. Client suffered a broken leg and knee requiring a patella implant. After full recovery from the other driver's insurance we were able to recover $100,000 (policy limits) from our client's under-insured motorist coverage despite set-off clauses in the policy and the insurance company's claim that the policy payout was set-off by the recovery from the other driver. The insurance company settled for the UIM policy limit.
What is Set-off in this situation? After a victim of injury resulting from a car accident recovers from the other party's insurance company in full (i.e. the other at fault party only had $25,000 in coverage) and that amount does not fully compensate the injury victim, then if the victim had under-insured motorist coverage (as our client did in this case) then the under-insured coverage carrier can sometimes take a set-off against the coverage amount the victim had. In this case, the under-insured carrier tried to claim that since $25,000 was recovered from the at fault party, then that amount should be deducted from the $100,000 under-insured coverage therefore they should only have to pay out $75,000. We were able to prevent that in this case due to a strict reading of the insurance policy and specifically it's under-insured and set-off clauses and they paid out the full $100,000 to our client as the set-off clause was ambiguous and therefore unenforceable.
MISSOURI INSURANCE SET-OFF CASE LAW
See Zemelman v. Equity Mut. Ins. Co., 935 S.W.2d 673 (Mo. App. WD 1996) Court read the policy’s UIM “set-off” provision against the policy’s “other insurance” provision and found it ambiguous because the language described the UIM as “excess over any other collectible insurance.”
