Catastrophic Injury by Co-Worker In most states, a co-worker cannot be held responsible for injuring a fellow worker even if the co-worker is negligent or reckless. However, there may still be a legal means of collecting monetary damages if caused by a car wreck. Depending on the policy language, it could be that there is coverage under the victim's personal uninsured motorist coverage and/or the employer's car insurance policy. Here is the case I just settled. Employee is a passenger in a company car driven by a co-worker in the Des Moines area.
The co-worker loses control of the car on icy roads and slides across the median where his car is
hit by a semi-tractor trailer vehicle going the other way. The employee passenger is severely
injured through no fault of his own, sustaining a skull fracture with brain injury and a cervical
fracture rendering him paraplegic. He was 32 years old but is now institutionalized for the rest Before I became involved, the car insurance company for the co-worker driver denied liability, claiming that the co-worker was not only immune from responsibility, but that the liability insurance policy excluded coverage for the co-worker driver. Therefore, there was no insurance to cover the co-worker driver for the catastrophic injuries to the employee passenger. However, once I became involved, I reviewed the private automobile insurance of the
employee passenger as well as the company car policy, and discovered that there was uninsured
motorist coverage for the employee passenger's damages. This was because under the
definitions of both policies, the co-worker driver was operating an "uninsured motor vehicle".
This meant the employee passenger could make a claim for uninsured motorist benefits under the Therefore, when an auto accident is caused by the negligence of a co-worker driver, and an employee is injured, a denial of coverage by a car insurance company based upon the liability of the co-worker driver does not mean that there is no insurance available. Uninsured motorist insurance coverage may provide another way to compensate the victim.
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