Personal Injury Attorneys for Ride Share Drivers
If you are a driver for a ride share service such as Uber or Lyft and you are injured by someone else in an accident, you have a personal injury claim. This type of claim proceeds in a completely different fashion to a typical personal injury claim.
We hope that you have contacted your personal auto insurance company and that you have added coverage through your personal auto policy while you’re engaged in delivering or transporting passengers. Unfortunately, in the State of Ohio the law does not make it easy for ride share drivers. In some other states, ride share companies are required to offer you or even provide you with underinsured and uninsured motorists coverage. So, if you are driving for a ride share company and you are hit by someone who is at fault who doesn’t have insurance, you are covered through your policy with the ride share company. But in Ohio, that’s not the way it works. In Ohio the default situation is that you are not protected. If you are hit by someone while driving for a ride share company, and they don’t have insurance, you are out of luck. There is no recovery for you, unless you dug deep into the ride share app and selected underinsured and uninsured protection for yourself (and paid more for that coverage) or called your personal auto insurance company and had coverage added for yourself relative to transporting passengers for a ride share company, or both.
At Willis, Willis & Rizzi we have represented ride share drivers and it can be a challenge to unpack what provisions are available for the driver. You need an experienced personal injury attorney who is familiar with ride share accidents to represent you. It’s also important to make sure you have the proper underinsured and uninsured coverage in place on both the ride share app as well as your personal auto policy to protect yourself.
Sadly, we have had cases where there was ultimately no insurance available through any of the mechanisms; the at fault driver had no insurance, and the injured party did not do anything to protect themselves. Please be aware if you are driving for a ride share company, you need to take additional steps to protect yourself.
Contact us today at 330-535-2000 or fill in the request form on this page to speak to a personal injury attorney today.
