This category includes disputes between an insured person or business entity and their insurance company (the insurer) over issues of coverage and/or the amount you should be entitled to recover in policy benefits even if coverage is not disputed.
We handle claims of this nature relating to all types of insurance policies, including but not necessarily limited to: automobile (all coverages including Underinsured/Unininsured Motorist Coverage), aircraft, boat, RV, homeowners, renters, professional errors and omissions (malpractice), commercial contractor's liability, life insurance, property casualty and general and specialty commercial business insurance.
Insurance policies are legal contracts and the insured and insurer are the contracting parties. At all times the insurer owes its insured a duty of good faith and fair dealing with respect to all questions of coverage and claims processing and payment. In some cases where the insurer can be shown to have acted in either an intentionally fraudulent or bad faith manner toward the insured in order to either wrongly deny coverage or undervalue a covered claim the courts will award additional damages to an insured in a lawsuit brought against its insurer, including potentially large awards of punitive damages in addition to compensatory damages for actual losses, in order to punish and deter such conduct in the future. Often your lawyer will not be able to evaluate the potential for such bad faith claim until the case has been fully investigated or perhaps even not until it is in the advance trial preparation stage. This is because sometimes the evidence of such conduct is only available in the internal documents of the insurer obtainable only through a subpoena or court order issued after litigation is commenced. However, in some cases the evidence sufficient to prove bad faith and support a claim for punitive damages is obvious and accessible upon first presentation of the case by the client. In order to best preserve all rights and remedies the insured should seek consultation from a lawyer experienced in this area of law at the earliest possible time after discovering or suspecting that their insurance company is not dealing fairly with them on their claim. This could be something as simple as an insurer failing to process the claim in a timely manner or repeatedly demanding additional information from the insured in excess of what is reasonable in order to evaluate and resolve a coverage question or damage claim.