Virginia’s 2023 Auto Insurance Limit Changes

Hi, my name is John Cooper, and I’m a personal injury lawyer with Cooper Hurley injury Lawyers. We are the car crash experts, and so what we do every day is automobile accident work involving injuries in Virginia, and so I wanted to tell you about some new developments that have happened in Virginia insurance law that have greatly uh quite frankly improved the deal for consumers in the state. So here’s what happened recently: the Virginia legislature increased the minimum limits that are to be issued on every automobile policy in Virginia.

I started practicing back in 1988. In 1988, when I got out of UVA law school, the rule was minimum coverage in Virginia was $25,000, so it didn’t matter if they made you a quadriplegic, if the insurance policy only had $25,000 minimum coverage, that’s all you got. And of course that resulted in lots of tragic situations. Now of course not every auto accident involves quadriplegia or a loss of a leg or something extreme like that, but these days with the cost of health insurance, $25,000 hardly covered your medical bills from from the emergency room, MRI, physical therapy, it was going to get to $25,000 like that and that doesn’t account for pain and suffering in the other parts of the claim. So the good news is as of January 1st 2022, we have a new higher limit of $30,000, so that’s a little improvement. But the law that was passed says in 2025 the number goes up to $50,000. So over time in the next few years, every case will probably have a little bit more value because there’s a little bit more upside even in the smallest of cases. The other thing to know is the general district courts in Virginia, which are our small claims courts, now allow you to sue for up to $50,000, so what’ll be smart about this rule is the lower court will have a limit of $50,000, every automobile policy will be at least $50,000, and so that means that we have a better chance of getting a full and fair recovery for the vast majority of our clients.

Now, for those who have injuries that are worth way more than $50,000, that’s a different story, and there’s a bunch of other more complicated rules about underinsured motorist coverage which I’ll cover in another video blog in the future, but the good news to hear today is the policy limits in your new Virginia automobile insurance have gone up and that’s a good thing for you; it protects you and your family as well as anybody you might hurt with your car. ABOUT COOPER HURLEY INJURY LAWYERS Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers helps those injured in car, truck, and motorcycle wrecks or other serious injury and wrongful death cases. Our Virginia-based firm is located in Norfolk, Virginia with client meeting locations in all of the cities of Hampton Roads and on the Eastern Shore. Our partners, John Cooper, Jim Hurley, Bill O’Mara, Griff O’Hanlon, and John Baker, have decades of experience and have secured millions for auto accident, TBI, railroad, slip and fall, and other accident victims.