Attorneys and adjusters representing policyholders outnumbered the show of hands from attorneys and adjusters representing insurance companies at the WIND Conference 2020 yesterday.
Copyright 2020 Dennis J. Wall.
At a class on Extracontractual issues, many issues were discussed. For openers, the two main reasons for insurance bad faith claims were identified as Delay and Undervalued. Insurance bad faith claims tend to be made in the greatest numbers, by far, when claims are delayed and when they are undervalued.
In Florida terms, a "CRN" or "Civil Remedy Notice" under Florida's Bad Faith Statute, Section 624.155, was discussed a lot. Good advice for those writing CRN's: Provide enough information in this statutory condition precedent to a bad faith claim to allow the carrier the opportunity to resolve the damages claim under the policy, and so resolve the alleged bad faith behavior beforehand. That is clearly the statutory purpose of the 60-day period under the Florida Statute.
"Peer review" may be the next shorthand reference in claims handling. This is admittedly anecdotal evidence, but anecdotal evidence in this context may simply be evidence that has not yet found its way into a court file. Hopefully it never will. The term has been used so far by a property insurance carrier in Pennsylvania to deny loss mitigation claims on the ground that after a "peer review" the policyholder essentially did not follow the prevailing standard of care by paying for a certain way to clean up the mess after a property loss such as a fire or flood. "Peer review" can be extended of course to many other things such as asserted lack of cooperation or claimed failure to protect the property after loss. "Peer review" may go down in the annals of claims handling along with such phrases as "round tabling," which was established long ago to identify a process in which many people go around a table to express their views about whether a claim is covered in essence. Time will tell.
Returning to Florida Insurance Bad Faith Law, the Florida Bad Faith Statute incorporates other statutes that in turn were written based on a Uniform Claim Settlement Procedures Act. Neither the Florida statutes nor the Uniform Act clearly identify or define what is a "General Business Practice." In Florida, proof of a GBP is a required element of a punitive damages claim. It was not mentioned yesterday but apparently the people that wrote the Uniform Act had case law and statutes in other areas of the law in mind, particularly Labor Law where it is a defined term, when they wrote about a "General Business Practice" in the context of Insurance Bad Faith.
All told, a very knowledgeable group attended the Extracontractual class at WIND 2020 yesterday. There was universal agreement with the spoken recognition of LITIGATION AND PREVENTION OF INSURER BAD FAITH as "The Bible of Bad Faith." As far as I am concerned, these were clearly people of good taste!
Copyright 2020 Dennis J. Wall.
Dennis Wall is the author of LITIGATION AND PREVENTION OF INSURER BAD FAITH, now in Two Volumes in its Third Edition with 2020 Supplements in process published by Thomson Reuters West.
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