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Subrogation is a concept that's well-known among legal and insurance professionals but rarely by the people they represent. If this term has come up when dealing with your insurance agent or a legal proceeding, it would be in your benefit to know the steps of the process. The more you know about it, the better decisions you can make with regard to your insurance policy.

Every insurance policy you own is an assurance that, if something bad happens to you, the business that insures the policy will make good in one way or another in a timely manner. If your house is broken into, your property insurance agrees to remunerate you or pay for the repairs, subject to state property damage laws.

But since figuring out who is financially responsible for services or repairs is usually a confusing affair – and time spent waiting in some cases increases the damage to the policyholder – insurance companies often decide to pay up front and assign blame after the fact. They then need a way to regain the costs if, once the situation is fully assessed, they weren't in charge of the payout.

For Example

Your kitchen catches fire and causes $10,000 in house damages. Happily, you have property insurance and it pays out your claim in full. However, the insurance investigator discovers that an electrician had installed some faulty wiring, and there is a decent chance that a judge would find him accountable for the loss. The home has already been fixed up in the name of expediency, but your insurance firm is out ten grand. What does the firm do next?

How Subrogation Works

This is where subrogation comes in. It is the method that an insurance company uses to claim reimbursement when it pays out a claim that turned out not to be its responsibility. Some insurance firms have in-house property damage lawyers and personal injury attorneys, or a department dedicated to subrogation; others contract with a law firm. Usually, only you can sue for damages to your self or property. But under subrogation law, your insurance company is given some of your rights for having taken care of the damages. It can go after the money originally due to you, because it has covered the amount already.

How Does This Affect Individuals?

For a start, if you have a deductible, your insurance company wasn't the only one who had to pay. In a $10,000 accident with a $1,000 deductible, you have a stake in the outcome as well – to be precise, $1,000. If your insurance company is lax about bringing subrogation cases to court, it might choose to recoup its expenses by raising your premiums and call it a day. On the other hand, if it knows which cases it is owed and pursues them aggressively, it is acting both in its own interests and in yours. If all of the money is recovered, you will get your full thousand-dollar deductible back. If it recovers half (for instance, in a case where you are found 50 percent accountable), you'll typically get half your deductible back, depending on the laws in your state.

Furthermore, if the total expense of an accident is over your maximum coverage amount, you could be in for a stiff bill. If your insurance company or its property damage lawyers, such as family law attorney Las Vegas NV, pursue subrogation and succeeds, it will recover your losses in addition to its own.

All insurers are not the same. When shopping around, it's worth looking at the reputations of competing agencies to evaluate if they pursue winnable subrogation claims; if they resolve those claims quickly; if they keep their clients posted as the case proceeds; and if they then process successfully won reimbursements immediately so that you can get your losses back and move on with your life. If, on the other hand, an insurance company has a record of honoring claims that aren't its responsibility and then safeguarding its bottom line by raising your premiums, even attractive rates won't outweigh the eventual headache.