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Alabama Bad Faith Insurance Claims

You depend on your insurance company to be there for you during an injury or accident. Your insurer should provide you and anyone else who is injured with the appropriate compensation for lost wages, medical expenses, property damages, mental anguish, and other losses specified in your policy. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

Sometimes insurance companies wrongfully deny or undervalue claims and in these cases, the experienced bad faith insurance lawyers at Belt, Bruner, & Barnett P.C. can help.

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Bad Faith Insurance Claims

The wrongful denial or under valuation of a claim is known as a bad faith insurance claim. Bad faith insurance claims are illegal and occur when an insurance company attempts to get away with unfair practices by taking advantage of people who are unfamiliar with the law. In an article entitled “An Excess Judgment Case: Tort Claims Against a Liability Insurer for Wrongfully Failing to Settle,” published in the Spring 2015 Journal of the Alabama Association for Justice, attorney Keith T. Belt, Jr. discussed bad faith insurance claims.

If you were injured and an insurance company is denying or delaying your claim, contact our experienced Alabama personal injury attorneys at Belt, Bruner, & Barnett P.C. We understand that insurance companies try to get rid of claims in any way possible. Don’t let them take advantage of you. We will make sure they carefully evaluate your claim and pay a reasonable amount for your losses. Contact us today at 205-933-1500.

Good Faith Is Required of Insurance Companies

While you would like to obtain the maximum compensation for your case, your insurance company may want to keep its money by paying you less than you deserve or failing to pay you at all. They may do so by automatically denying your claim, lowballing a settlement, or delaying payments.

Under Alabama law, insurance companies are required to act in good faith. Whether you are making a first-party claim as the person who is insured or a third-party claim as someone who was injured by the person who is insured, the insurance company must carefully evaluate the claim and act in good faith. That requires the insurance company to:

Adequately investigate the facts of the claim
Consider the strengths and weaknesses of all evidence
Honestly evaluate the claim
Honestly interpret the insurance policy

Consider the financial interests of the person insured
Settle within policy limits, if possible
Consider the likelihood that the claimant will sue and win
Evaluate the possible range of a verdict if the claimant sues and wins

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We’ve successfully represented clients who have suffered many types of injuries, and we’ll do our best to pursue maximum compensation for your losses. We will deliver the attention you deserve and take care of all the details of your case so you can focus on recovery.

Identifying Bad Faith Tactics

You may be wondering what types of tactics insurance companies use in bad faith insurance claims. The attorneys at Belt, Bruner, & Barnett P.C., have worked with a wide variety of cases related to bad faith insurance claims. Some of the most common bad faith tactics they see in bad faith insurance claims include:

Denying coverage without a claim investigation
Refusing to negotiate a fair settlement when the liability is obvious
Delaying payments of valid claims
Misinterpreting laws or language in an insurance policy
Refusing documentation requests or a written explanation of the reasons a claim was denied
Offering a substantially less settlement than the claim is worth
Transferring a claim multiple times to a number of different claim adjuster
Threatening the policyholder with disrespectful or inappropriate statements

Recovering Compensation for Bad Faith

A bad faith insurance claim must be proven through circumstances and facts that demonstrate that an insurance company has acted in bad faith. Since bad faith insurance claims can be difficult to prove, it’s essential to consult an experienced bad faith insurance attorney who can thoroughly investigate your claim and build a strong case.

Proving bad faith and making a recovery can be different for first- and third- party claims.

First-Party Bad Faith Claims – If an insurance company delays or denies an insurance claim without debatable reason, it is acting in bad faith and may be liable for punitive damages in addition to the losses incurred by the claimant.
Third-Party Bad Faith Claims – If an insurance company delays or denies an insurance claim unreasonably, after considering the totality of the circumstances, it may be liable for punitive damages in addition to the losses incurred by the claimant.

While insurance companies typically do not have to pay claims more than policy limits, in both first- and third-party cases, an insurance company may be liable for the full amount of a verdict that is recovered if it acts in bad faith.

Case Results

$25,000,000

Settlement in a Bad Faith/Fraud Case