The Seiden Law Firm Changes Legal Landscape for Insurance Bad Faith Victims

Representing a young couple against a major insurer, The Seiden Law Firm obtained a landmark Supreme Court of Florida victory for insurance bad faith victims in Allstate Indemnity Company, v. Ruiz, 899 So.2d 1121 (Fla. 2005.)

"Allstate Indemnity Company v. Ruiz changed the legal landscape on discovery in these 'bad faith' cases," wrote Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal Judge Gary M. Farmer in Provident Life & Accident Insurance Company v. Genovese, 943 So.2d 321, 323 (Fla. 4th DCA 2006). "Although the principal holding did away with the distinctions between first-party and third-party claims, its equally significant holding was to recognize the true nature of the relationship between a liability insurance carrier and its insureds in dealing with a covered claim as non-adversarial."

Henry A. Seiden, the Firm's President, engaged Allstate Indemnity Company in a decade-long battle on behalf of Joaquin and Paulina Ruiz, a young South Florida couple who suffered devastating personal financial chaos after they were wrongly denied property damage coverage and benefits by Allstate.

As a result of the Florida Supreme Court victory, The Seiden Law Firm successfully changed long-standing Florida law, forcing insurers to open their claim and litigation files to victims of insurance bad faith.

"As the insureds succinctly posit, how is one to ever determine whether an insurance company has processed, analyzed, or litigated a claim in a fair, forthright, and good faith manner if access is totally denied to the underlying file materials that reflect how the matter was processed and contain the direct evidence of whether the claim was processed in 'good' or 'bad' faith?" wrote Florida Supreme Court Justice R. Fred Lewis in Ruiz.

"Without access to the underlying files, the insureds assert that an insured, a litigant, judge or jury can know little of the insurer's processing of the matter, thereby jeopardizing and denying a fair analysis of any bad faith claim," Lewis continued. "They assert that the same would hold true if an insurance company simply sought to totally shield all documents that pertain to the processing of the underlying claim by asserting that such material was prepared in anticipation of the bad faith action. In other words, it is asserted that the claim litigation file material constitutes the best and only evidence of an insurer's conduct."

As a result of this stunning high court victory, the Ruizes were able to obtain "smoking gun" claim file materials -- substantiating Allstate's bad faith misconduct -- that the insurer desperately fought for years to withhold. A confidential settlement was reached shortly after the Supreme Court of Florida decision forced Allstate to produce the claim file documents to The Seiden Law Firm and the Ruizes.

The changed legal landscape, pioneered by the Ruizes and The Seiden Law Firm, now enables innocent victims of bad faith to obtain irrefutable evidence of insurance company misconduct and unfair claim practices, entitling the victims to money damages arising from insurer injustice.

To read this landmark opinion, see http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/decisions/2005/sc01-893.pdf