Periodically, we are consulted by car and truck crash victims who were persuaded to sign a release of their injury claims prematurely and without the assistance of an attorney. Historically, they were out of luck. Insurance companies love unrepresented people because often such people have no clue as to the value of their case and find negotiating stressful.
A few thousand dollars may seem enticing in the immediate aftermath of a bad crash but the short term relief often doesn't take care of the long-term consequences and regrets soon follow.
You see, insurance personnel are trained to win the trust of unsuspecting accident and personal injury victims. Ordinary folk are not. It is one reason insurance company commercials are so light-hearted. Gekkos emus and " good neighbors" dominate the commercials during sporting events but insurance companies make far more money for their executives and shareholders by holding down claims costs.
Several liability insurers spent more than one billion dollars on their " happy advertising" with sports stars, quirky characters and animals in recent years.See: https://www.carriermanagement.com/features/2024/01/18/257945.htm
Why? To win the public's trust so they just might swallow ever increasing auto insurance premiums and ever declining settlement offers
Maryland is dominated by insurance money in its politics and its rare that laws benefitting injured people are sucessfully passed but every once in a while behavior so unfair and reprehensible is made public and efforts to alay public upset occur.
In Maryland Sec 5-401.1 of the Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article is just such a remedial law. It provides an avenue for injured parties to get out from under releases signed " within 30 days of the infliction of injuries without the assistance or guidance of an attorney".
What this means is if you are injured on say, January 1, 2025 and you are persuaded by the liability insurer for the at-fault driver to accept a settlement offer, sign a release and accept compensation, you have the ability with certain specific constraints, to void the release, return the money and start over with one caveat, that you can't have worked with " the assistance or guidance of an attorney at law."
Which is to say, if you had an attorney the law doesn't help you.
So why does this law exist? The answer is an increasing incidence of ordinary folks getting undercompensated by insurers because they don't have lawyers working with them. At Clark and Steinhorn, we hear from such people regularly albeit, often too late for us to sve them from their settlement mistake.
So if you think you've made a mistake in accepting an early settlement act fast because the la provides you a sixty day window to nullify your settlement made within thirty days of your injury.
To be clear, there are nuances in the law to be aware of the text of the portion of this law we are focused on today is the following:
