A couple facing more than $1 million in medical expenses stemming from a car crash may proceed with claims that an agent negligently misled them about the status of their underinsured-motorist coverage, a divided Montana Supreme Court has ruled.
15 May 2013Ken Bradley
An agent’s insistence that she routinely discussed customers’ coverage choices with them, absent a specific recollection of having done so here, raised a genuine issue as to the discrepancy in the parties’ understanding of the policy, a 4-2 majority determined in a May 2 opinion.
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An insurer must pay the defense costs of the former director of a hospital’s liver transplant center in a criminal lawsuit accusing him of authorizing an illegal operation and conspiring to cover it up, a California appeals court has ruled.
09 May 2013Ken Bradley
Mt. Hawley Insurance Co. had argued that its policy with Daughters of Charity Health System Inc. incorporates Cal. Ins. Code § 533.5, which explicitly bars insurers from providing a defense in certain criminal actions.
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A federal appeals court has reinstated a lawsuit by Ticketmaster alleging breach of contract and bad faith against its insurer for refusing to defend the ticket vendor against a class action over its service fees.
09 May 2013Ken Bradley
In an unsigned April 26 opinion reversing a trial court’s decision to dismiss the suit, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the policy exclusion the lower court relied on, Exclusion E, too ambiguous to support the dismissal.
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A California appeals court has reinstated a woman’s asbestos-related lawsuit against Los Angeles because the city waived its right to assert that the claims were filed too late.
09 May 2013Ken Bradley
Because the city had an obligation to respond to the claims within 45 days after they were filed, the trial court wrongly granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss, the 2nd District Court of Appeal said in an unpublished opinion.
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A Florida federal jury has awarded more than $4.3 million to the wife of a smoker who died from lung cancer after smoking for more than five decades.
03 May 2013Ken Bradley
The final award represents 72.5 percent of the $5.9 million in compensatory damages the jury awarded, which matches the 72.5 percent fault the jury assigned R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. for the man’s death.
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A California state appeals court has rejected an insurance company’s plea to increase the amount that two co-insurers must pay for the shared costs of defending against and settling several asbestos-related lawsuits.
03 May 2013Ken Bradley
United States Fire Insurance Co. failed to show that the trial court had improperly apportioned the legal costs among the litigants, according to the 1st District Court of Appeal.
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A federal judge in Knoxville, Tenn., has rejected a bad-faith claim in a lawsuit in which a policyholder with obsessive compulsive disorder accused his insurer of improperly denying his claim for total disability benefits.
25 Apr 2013Ken Bradley
The policyholder failed to show the insurer acted in bad faith when it denied him coverage for total disability, according to U.S. District Judge Leon Jordan of the Eastern District of Tennessee.
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A California appeals court has revived a lawsuit brought by the wife of a construction worker who died allegedly of mesothelioma, finding she presented sufficient evidence that exposure to the defendant’s product caused her husband’s injury.
25 Apr 2013Ken Bradley
The plaintiff “met her burden of showing, within reasonable medical probability,” that the defendant’s asbestos-containing plastic cement was a substantial factor leading to her husband’s risk of cancer, the 2nd District Court of Appeal said.
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A Pennsylvania appeals court has determined that a bar and restaurant is not entitled to an exception to the state’s clean-air law that would allow smoking inside the bar because the bar area is not fully enclosed.
22 Apr 2013Ken Bradley
The Commonwealth Court also ruled that any remedial action taken after the effective date of the law is irrelevant.
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Anthem Blue Cross acted with malice when it denied a doctor’s application to join its preferred provider network and caused him nearly $4.5 million in damages, a Los Angeles jury has found.
22 Apr 2013Ken Bradley
Plaintiff Dr. Jeffrey Nordella, a self-described “patient advocate,” said in a statement shortly after the April 4 verdict that Anthem Blue Cross “puts profits before patients by unlawfully excluding qualified doctors from its provider network.
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