Bad Faith Blog

Summary: The County unconstitutionally strip searched multiple arrestees between 1999 and 2002. Recognizing the defenseless nature of the case, Selective Insurance Company of America (Selective) and retained counsel, settled the case, funded the settlement, and then sued the County to recover the multiple deductibles paid. The courts below determined the County owed a deductible paid on its behalf, assessed all defense costs and fees to one plaintiff, and rejected the County’s bad faith claim. The highest court in New York affirmed.

Summary: The Supreme Court of Florida approved the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission’s (“Commission”) Findings and Recommendations that a trial judge’s pre-election violations of professional ethics rules warranted her removal from office.

United States Fidelity & Guaranty Company (USF&G) sued its re-insurers, including American Re-Insurance Company, seeking to recover “a share of the nearly billion dollars it paid in settling asbestos claims.” An earlier summary judgment motion had been appealed to, ruled upon, and remanded by the highest court in New York after finding a fact issue remained whether “USF&G, in allocating the settlement amount, reasonably attributed nothing to the so called ‘bad faith’ claims made against it. …” On remand the re-insurers sought to put on evidence of the reasonableness of the allocation of all settlement dollars. The trial court denied that motion, a ruling affirmed on appeal. The re-insurers could challenge at trial USF&G’s zero dollar allocation to bad faith claims and whether USF&G had given unreasonable values to certain classes of asbestos injury (“lung cancer asbestosis, pleural thickening and ‘other cancers’”). In other words, the trial was to be limited to determining whether those classes of asbestos claims had been “inflated by USF&G,” and whether part of those values should have been attributed to bad faith claims. The trial was not to determine any other reasonableness issues.