Injured Trucker's $15,000 Uninsured Motorist Limit Reformed to $1 Million in Ruling Upheld on Appeal

On February 7, 1995, Francis Clark Antley was behind the wheel of a truck owned by his employer, Southern Bulk Haulers, Inc., when an unidentified vehicle caused a wreck in Savannah, Georgia, and left him seriously injured. Because the driver who caused the crash was never located, Antley's only path to real compensation for the collision itself ran through uninsured motorist coverage, first a "John Doe" action under his personal auto policy in Georgia, and then a claim under the UM provision of his employer's commercial policy with Nobel Insurance Company.

That second claim is where the fight started. On its face, Nobel's policy carried only South Carolina's then-mandatory minimum of $15,000 in UM protection, even though the same policy provided liability coverage of up to $1 million. Nobel took the position that Antley was owed nothing beyond workers' compensation, and that if he could reach the UM coverage at all, $15,000 was the ceiling.

Represented by E. Alan Kennington and Ellen McCloy of George Sink, P.A. Injury Lawyers in North Charleston, Antley filed a declaratory judgment action asking a South Carolina court to reform the policy. The theory was built on the state's "meaningful offer" doctrine: an insurer that fails to genuinely offer optional additional UM coverage, spelling out the available limits rather than gesturing at the option in general terms, cannot hold a claimant to the bare statutory minimum. Nobel had used an internally generated form that, the Sink lawyers argued, never told the employer what additional coverage was actually available.

The case was submitted on stipulated facts, which included that Antley had received $101,901.55 in workers' compensation benefits. On June 30, 2000, Circuit Judge William P. Keesley ruled for Antley on both fronts. Workers' compensation, the court held, did not bar the UM claim, comp exclusivity shields the employer from tort suits, not the insurer from its coverage obligations. And because Nobel's form flunked the meaningful offer test, the court reformed the policy so Antley could recover up to the full $1 million liability limit, offset by the comp benefits he had already received.

Nobel appealed, and in June 2002 the South Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed in a published opinion, Antley v. Nobel Insurance Co., 350 S.C. 621, 567 S.E.2d 872. Applying the state supreme court's Wannamaker factors, the appellate panel agreed that an offer which merely mentions optional coverage without specifying its limits is no offer at all, and it rejected Nobel's attempt to treat workers' compensation as Antley's exclusive remedy.

The decision transformed what the insurer had framed as a $15,000 claim into access to a million dollars in coverage for a badly injured trucker, and it did so in a precedent that South Carolina courts and practitioners have cited since in UM coverage disputes. For a firm best known for high-volume advertising, the Antley opinion is a matter of public court record showing George Sink, P.A. lawyers litigating, and winning, a coverage question with stakes far beyond their own client.