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babsonnexus t1_j3wztrv wrote

Reply to comment by PetalPerfection in Looking for advice on dealing with a claim with the Providence city law department. by PetalPerfection

I'm sorry, I know you were trying to be a nice, reasonable, and logical person, but almost everyone else was out to screw you over and did so (it is their job to protect their company's interests, not yours). You never should have accepted or signed anything from the insurance company if that was the way they were acting and instead needed to get a lawyer involved. It might be too late because of the actions you have taken, but you should get a free consultation and see if one can do something for you. Even a lawyer just calling the City one time might make the check show up magically tomorrow, so the $300 would be worth it.

Just as an FYI, the amount is not the issue. I dealt with a $100K claim at an unoccupied property I was involved with and never touched the money myself; everything went between the insurance company and the contractors. I was lucky enough in this case that the contractors did all the battling with the insurance company so I did not have to get a lawyer involved myself. A lot of contractors don't like doing this, so YMMV.

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PetalPerfection OP t1_j3xv7v5 wrote

I appreciate the advice but we did get a lawyer involved at the start. Dealing with the city is not at all the same with dealing contractors.

First off, most lawyers didn’t want to touch this issue with a 10ft pole because it’s near impossible to challenge a city on these matters. We had to call the Rhode Island bar association to even get someone to talk to us about what our rights were and what we can do. If the city had refused to take responsibility that would have been different but they admitted responsibility from Day 1.

Secondly, we were basically told that the insurance company is under no obligation to chase the city on our behalf. Our policy allowed for $5k in sewer damages, and as noted, we were lucky we even got that. They denied us twice. Could we have kept fighting them? Maybe, but that would have slowed down this process even more. No one wants to deal with city claims because cities are slow to pay out.

And for the record, if we don’t get an answer from the city lawyer soon we will go the legal route again but that means losing money again and we don’t get to recoup those fees.

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