Subrogation is a term that's understood among legal and insurance companies but rarely by the customers who hire them. If this term has come up when dealing with your insurance agent or a legal proceeding, it is in your benefit to understand an overview of how it works. The more knowledgeable you are, the better decisions you can make about your insurance policy.

Every insurance policy you have is an assurance that, if something bad occurs, the insurer of the policy will make good in a timely manner. If you get hurt while you're on the clock, your employer's workers compensation insurance pays out for medical services. Employment lawyers handle the details; you just get fixed up.

But since determining who is financially accountable for services or repairs is often a time-consuming affair – and delay often compounds the damage to the policyholder – insurance companies often decide to pay up front and figure out the blame later. They then need a means to regain the costs if, ultimately, they weren't actually responsible for the payout.

Can You Give an Example?

You arrive at the hospital with a sliced-open finger. You give the receptionist your medical insurance card and he takes down your policy information. You get taken care of and your insurer gets a bill for the services. But the next day, when you get to work – where the accident happened – your boss hands you workers compensation forms to file. Your workers comp policy is actually responsible for the bill, not your medical insurance policy. It has a vested interest in getting that money back somehow.

How Does Subrogation Work?

This is where subrogation comes in. It is the way that an insurance company uses to claim reimbursement when it pays out a claim that turned out not to be its responsibility. Some companies 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 person or property. But under subrogation law, your insurer is given some of your rights in exchange for making good on the damages. It can go after the money originally due to you, because it has covered the amount already.

Why Should I Care?

For a start, if your insurance policy stipulated a deductible, your insurer wasn't the only one who had to pay. In a $10,000 accident with a $1,000 deductible, you lost some money too – namely, $1,000. If your insurance company is lax about bringing subrogation cases to court, it might opt to recoup its costs by boosting your premiums and call it a day. On the other hand, if it knows which cases it is owed and goes after those cases 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 one-half responsible), you'll typically get half your deductible back, depending on the laws in your state.

Furthermore, if the total expense of an accident is more than your maximum coverage amount, you may have had to pay the difference. If your insurance company or its property damage lawyers, such as Wrongful death attorney Tacoma, Wa, pursue subrogation and wins, it will recover your losses in addition to its own.

All insurers are not created equal. When shopping around, it's worth measuring the reputations of competing agencies to determine whether they pursue valid subrogation claims; if they resolve those claims fast; if they keep their accountholders apprised as the case proceeds; and if they then process successfully won reimbursements right away so that you can get your money back and move on with your life. If, on the other hand, an insurer has a reputation of paying out claims that aren't its responsibility and then protecting its income by raising your premiums, even attractive rates won't outweigh the eventual headache.