No matter how much effort your company puts into developing a harassment-free environment, all it takes is one rude or highly sensitive employee to put your company at risk of harassment complaints. Maybe your naturally flirtatious lead salesperson offends a transfer...
Once upon a time in Texas, a disgruntled employee might settle a dispute with their employer with a gun. Nowadays, most choose a lawsuit as their weapon of choice. As an employer, you need to be alert to this danger. While a lawsuit won’t kill you, it could certainly...
New court decisions have blurred the lines between contractual and extracontractual liability claims in the third party claim context. What was once a purely contractual claim—breach of the duty to defend—has recently evolved into a claim for tort damages in Texas....
What is left of the “Estoppel by Appraisal” doctrine after the Texas Supreme Court’s decisions in Ortiz, Barbara Tech, and Hinojos? On one hand, Ortiz was a very favorable ruling for insurers, holding that payment of an appraisal award effectively bars bad faith claims, absent the rare case proving “independent injury.” See Oscar Ortiz v. State Farm Lloyds, 589 S.W.3d…
Today Texas Supreme Court extended its holding in Barbara Tech. Corp. v. State Farm Lloyds that payment of an appraisal award does not extinguish penalty interest or attorney’s fees under the Prompt Payment of Claims Act. 589 S.W.3d 806 (Tex. 2019). The Court categorically rejected the “reasonable undisputed payment” defense as inconsistent with Barbara Tech. See Hinojos v. State Farm…
In our first webinar, we had a lively discussion on the impact of the Big Freeze on claims, coverage, and bad faith litigation. For context, the three costliest storms from 2008-2017 totaled insured losses of just over $32B. The Big Freeze is on the way to surpass these totals. Why? What sets the Big Freeze apart is that it was…
There have been major updates to in the field of COVID-19 business interruption litigation. Several courts have ruled in favor of insurance companies and dismissed business owners claims for coverage. New York and Michigan are two states that have ruled against COVID-19 business interruption claims. The Courts held that business interruption claim payouts require a tangible alteration to a property…
By the second week of March 2020, while the man who would become the alleged “Patient Zero” for the new coronavirus outbreak appeared to do everything right, the U.S. economy was about to fall into the largest business “deep freeze” in the last 85 years. Around November 15, 2019, it was realized by the healthcare industry, and other health organizations,…
There are several class action lawsuits arising from the COVID-19 crisis. Notably, no two lawsuits appear to be quite the same. The facts and parties to these lawsuits represent a variety of industries and consumers across the country. Thus far, the American legal system is seeing six major areas of COVID-19 class action litigation: Class action lawsuits against insurers Class…
Thank you for joining me for my second installment discussing workers’ compensation issues and COVID-19. Since my last blog during the first week of May, there have been some changes in the lay of the land – yet much of the attention has been diverted from the legal implications of how to handle actual suits being filed and how to…
