A: The first thing you should do is notify your personal attorney if you have one. Your attorney will explain to you who you must timely notify with your insurance company and what your obligations are under the insurance policy contract that you have with your insurance company. The next step is to contact your insurance agent and make sure that a copy of the lawsuit paperwork gets to your insurance company. The insurance company should immediately file a response to the lawsuit on your behalf. Contacting your personal attorney will help make sure that this happens, as your attorney will most probably write your agent and your company a letter on your behalf regarding this matter. In many instances your attorney may also file your initial response for you to make sure that your insurance company does not drop the ball. Insurance companies are usually pretty good about this but it is better to be safe than sorry. When your insurance company hires an attorney for you, you should stay in contact with the attorney. You may be needed to answer discovery requests or to give sworn testimony in a deposition proceeding and/or later at trial if the case does not get resolved. You also need to know what is going on in the lawsuit filed against you. Sometimes your insurance company does a good job of protecting you from a loss of your assets as a result of a judgment being entered against you if you are not successful at trial. However, you should also be concerned that you are being treated fairly by your insurance company. Sometimes the insurance company is willing to gamble with your assets and this can possibly have bad results for you. You can always contact a personal attorney to discuss this situation. While the attorney hired by the insurance company is supposed to have your best interest as his foremost concern, occasionally the attorney can remember who is paying his bill for representing you and not do what is in your absolute best interest. Also, read your insurance policy. If you can't understand what it means, don't feel bad. A lot of times an attorney has to work hard to really understand what the language in an insurance policy really means. If you don't know, ask your attorney to explain the policy to you. Questions you should think about and discuss with your attorney:

• If the car wreck was your fault, why didn't your insurance company fairly settle the other person's claims against you so you didn't get sued? Many times insurance companies have taken a position that they are going to defend a particular type of claim regardless of whether you were really at fault and even if the injured person is making a reasonable demand. What the insurance companies are doing is trying to make it unprofitable for an attorney who represents injury victims to take that particular type of case so that those people can't be treated fairly even if they were in the right and really did get hurt. This isn't fair to the person that got hurt (which unfortunately could be you or me tomorrow) and it isn't in your best interest. Do you really have a week to spend in court at a trial when your insurance company should have paid the claim?

• Is the attorney hired by your insurance company doing everything he or she thinks needs to be done to defend you in court, or is the insurance company calling the shots on what your attorney does? In years gone past, defense attorneys used to be able to do whatever they reasonably needed to do to defend you in court. The insurance company paid the cost of doing so. Now the insurance companies have started dictating to the attorney what he or she can or can't do on your behalf. This is not in your best interest. If you think this is happening see your personal attorney. The attorney hired by the insurance company probably won't tell you the truth about this because he would lose that company's business. He will probably be more honest about this with your personal attorney even though he shouldn't. If that is the case, a short letter from your personal attorney to your insurance company will probably resolve the problem very quickly.

• Is the attorney that your insurance company picked for you an independent attorney or is the attorney an employee of the insurance company itself? Ask the attorney hired to represent you about this issue. Make sure that you are convinced that the attorney assigned to represent you has your best interest at heart and not his or her employer's. This is what you pay for when you pay for your insurance policy. If you are not comfortable see your personal attorney and have him or her request independent counsel. In-house attorneys are not necessarily bad. Many are good lawyers and are as honest as the day is long. But you still need to have a good defense in any lawsuit filed against you.

• Is the litigation process treating everyone fairly? It is hard to say you are being treated fairly when you are getting sued. Guess what? The guy suing you probably feels the same way. When you think about the case, really look at yourself and try to decide, Am I really at fault in this case? If so, admit your mistake. We all make mistakes. You can still defend a case on damage issues if you feel the person suing you is asking for an unfair amount of money.

A: This varies from state to state. Ask your attorney about this for specifics. Generally, an injured person can recover the following types of past and future damages that apply in their case. These are:

• medical bills,
• lost earnings,
• physical pain,
• mental anguish,
• physical impairment, and
• property damage.

If a person is disfigured in the injury incident, they can also recover damages for physical disfigurement. Each case has different facts. Each state has differing laws. You need to know these differences to be able to determine what is fair. A good way to look at this is to ask yourself, If this happened to me or my spouse or my child what would I think is fair? You probably just gave yourself a good answer. That is all the other fellow wants also.