Daily Archive for November 14th, 2018

We have posted nearly 1,500 bad faith case summaries over the last 12 years. During October and November 2018, we significantly upgraded the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Insurance Bad Faith Case Law Blog and all of those posts, making them easier to search and read. Many hours and thousands of edits have gone into this process.

New Searchable Categories

We have added tens of new search categories, grouping cases by topic into distinct, searchable, subsets. These categories can be found on the far left of the home page, and are broken down into New Jersey (NJ) post categories, and Pennsylvania (PA) post categories. You can click on the category to pull up the posts tagged under that category.

By way of only a few examples, we have identified case categories for: delays by insureds, claims handling delay, federal pleading adequacy and inadequacy, negligence distinguished from bad faith, removal, bifurcation (severance) and stays, who is an insurer for statutory bad faith purposes, when a finding of no duty under an insurance policy cuts off potential bad faith claims, the role state insurance statutes and regulations play in bad faith cases, and cases involving the insured’s own bad faith conduct. There are many more categories we invite you to explore.

General Searches and Opinion Links

You can also search using words you choose yourself. In the upper left of the home page, under the calendar, is a search box where users can enter search terms and get a set of posts with those terms.

We include the names of the judges making the decisions summarized in our posts so you can search posted case summaries by an individual judge’s name. We similarly include the court names in each summary’s caption so you can search by court name as well. (Our shorthand for courts names can be found here.)

We have added hundreds of links to the opinions themselves for many of the summaries that previously had no links (though we do not have an opinion link for all 1,500 posts).

Finally, some trends appear when organizing the cases by topic. Among other things, it is interesting to see where the balance falls between decisions finding claims handling reasonable or unreasonable, or between courts addressing whether bad faith can or cannot exist if there is no contractual duty to provide a benefit of indemnification or defense. And while it is not surprising that many cases originate in the uninsured/underinsured motorist context, it still leaps out that nearly 20% of our posts come from UM/UIM cases, indicating the impact this case type has in shaping bad faith law generally.

Again, we invite you to explore the site.

If you have a Pennsylvania or New Jersey bad faith judicial opinion or jury verdict of interest, please feel free to email us the case for posting. You can email us at lapplebaum@finemanlawfirm.com.