In Florida, car accidents generally stay on your record anywhere from three to five years. Florida is a no-fault state so that really whether you're involved in an accident should not affect the premium that you pay for your insurance unless you are cited for causing the accident and the insurance company had to pay out money to fix the other person's car or to pay money for harm that you caused, those will affect rates.
Every insurance company has their own point system that they use, which will have their own in-house formula to determine what they're gonna charge for rates. I always tell people to shop it around because even though you may feel an attachment to the insurance company because you've been with them 20 years, the insurance company does not look at it that way.
Public Records In Court?
So car accidents are a public record and I can hire private investigators that can find all of the accidents that people have been in, probably over the course of their whole life, and I often do that in cases where the defendant driver is driving a corporate vehicle or a company-owned vehicle because I can often show that that person had no business driving for the company. When you pull up the prior records, that puts the case in its proper perspective for a jury to look at and see what should happen to that company.
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