[drcy]

I know a lawyer for a law firm that works only in insurance disputes involving buildings in the Seattle area. I asked him what was his success rate suing insurance companies and he said he's never lost. He said insurance companies regularly break state statutes and their own contracts in the hope that the people won't do anything about it. He said their regular automatic reaction is to deny claims even when the contract says it should be covered.

He said insurance companies regularly want to settle before it goes to court, because their bad practice and rule breaking in the one particular case is often something they do in many to all their cases and they want to avoid a court decision that could be blanket applied to all their cases and contracts. He said he'll find something statute breaking in a particular contract he's working on and the problem for the insurance company is it's something standard they have in many to all their contracts.

A specific example he gave is, at least in Washington State, when an insurance company denies your claims, they are required by state statute to include in the denial letter that the insurance owner has the legal right to dispute the claim within a year. He got a settlement against an insurance company in part because they didn't include that text in the denial letter and the building owner didn't know he had a year to dispute the denial and waited longer. The insurance company wanted the claim dismissed because he waited too long. He said the big problem for the insurance company is he's pretty sure they hadn't been including that text in most of their denials letters.