November 2012 - Palm Beach County Bar Association Flower Sponsor of the Month, celebrating the Bar's new building

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"When life gives you a hundred reasons   to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile."

~   Unknown    

The attorney represented a client who was seriously injured in a vehicle accident as the result of the defendant's negligence. The coverage was limited.   However, knowing that the driver's home address was in a northeast resort town, the attorney suspected the adverse had additional assets. Her paralegal utilized a proprietary database to identify potential attachable assets and found nothing but the home address and the defendant's vehicle, neither of which had a high value.

The attorney contacted CLI and provided us with a copy of her database report. On review, we determined that the report provided to the attorney contained much less information than was available to licensed investigators (see companion article, "Don't Always Trust a Database Report"). We obtained our own database report and researched public records to identify another property not disclosed in the attorney's report. This property appeared to be a second home in Florida, which was not homesteaded.

Have you ever declined a substantial injury case because you felt the adverse party did not have sufficient coverage? Perhaps you're a busy trial lawyer who has delegated to your paralegal the task of running a proprietary database report (Accurint or Lexis/Nexis). A day or so later, the paralegal provides you with an incomprehensible report with lots of information organized into confusing categories. After a quick perusal of the identified assets (perhaps a car, a homesteaded property), you determine that there are insufficient assets to pursue litigation. Due to the policy limits, you make a determination that the adverse has no assets and you turn down the case.