When I was 13 years old I had an experience nobody wants to have. I was on vacation with friends 5 hours from my hometown and was woken up early in the morning and told that we had to leave. I had no idea what was going on, but I could tell something was wrong. After spending 5 hours in the car I pulled in to my house and was presented with the news that would change my life forever.

My parents sat me down and told me that my older brother had died in a car accident. They didn’t get in to details at the time, but I later learned that he was the passenger and the driver had been drunk.

This was a whirlwind time for my family and me, obviously. We have family all over the country that needed to make travel plans, we had to make funeral plans, and we had to deal with the hundreds of people that were coming in and out of our house. All of this distracted us from the legal issues that manifest after an incident like this.

We weren’t vindictive whatsoever. We had no interest in suing the family of the driver, because we felt that it was a result of a shared lack of judgment. Because of this, we never thought to contact an attorney. We later learned why this was a mistake, and what we should have done.

When someone is the victim of a wrongful death circumstance such as the situation I just described, if the driver is insured their insurance company has a default amount that they are supposed to pay to the family of the deceased. This isn’t something that they do without provocation, though. In my family’s situation, all that needed to happed was for our lawyer to contact the driver’s insurance company and indicate that we wanted a settlement, and that would have essentially been the end of it. Beyond that, if we had wanted to sue we could have, but either way we would have received a cash settlement of some kind.

My family was lucky enough to be in a financial situation where we didn’t need the money, but many others aren’t so lucky. It’s important to know what steps to take if this situation happens to you, and if you live in Las Vegas, the person to contact is Laura Hunt. She is the number one wrongful death attorney Las Vegas has to offer, and she will always be more than willing to help you if a loved one or family member of yours is the victim of a wrongful death circumstance.

The moral of the story is – the insurance companies are not on your side. If you don’t make some sort of effort to get what’s entitled to you, they are not going to come to you. No one wants to be in the situation my family and I were in, but if it happens to you, be sure to contact a lawyer so that you don’t miss out on what may be rightfully yours.