BANKRUPTCY COURT PERMITS BAD FAITH CLAIM TO PROCEED, EVEN AFTER BREACH OF CONTRACT CLAIM DISMISSED (Philadelphia Bankruptcy Court)
This is a rare bad faith case raised before a Bankruptcy Court in the context of an adversary proceeding.
The bankrupt/insureds brought a first party property damage claim against an excess insurer. It is not fully clear from the record if the insureds were parties to the excess insurance agreement, which appears to be designed to protect a mortgage holder. In any event, the court held there was nothing in the record that could establish excess coverage was triggered. Thus, the court granted summary judgment on the breach of contract claim, finding no excess coverage possibly due that could have invoked the insurance contract’s coverage obligations.
The absence of any benefits being due, however, did not stop the court from analyzing the bad faith claim, and ultimately allowing that claim to proceed.
As discussed many times in this blog, there is a serious issue about whether a statutory bad faith claim can proceed if the insurer has not denied any benefit under an insurance policy, i.e., payment of a first party claim or defense and indemnification under a liability insurance policy. This limitation appears to be the required by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Toy v. Metropolitan Life. An article addressing this issue can be found here. See also this January 2020 post, this March 2021 post, and this January 2021 post questioning whether the non-precedential Third Circuit decision in Gallatin Fuels failed to consider Toy in reaching the conclusion that it was possible to pursue a bad faith claim when no policy was even in effect at the time of the loss.
In the present adversary proceeding, the court chiefly relied on Gallatin Fuels for the proposition that statutory bad faith claims can be pursued even where no benefits are due because there is no enforceable insurance contract, solely based on claims of poor investigation practices and possible misrepresentations during the investigation.
The court also relied on Pennsylvania’s Unfair Insurance Practices Act and Unfair Claim Settlement Practices regulations in finding a potential basis for bad faith. In particular, the court cites, 31 Pa. Code § 146.6 (providing “that every insurer shall complete investigation of a claim within thirty days after notification of the claim unless it cannot reasonably be completed in that time. It further provides that if the investigation cannot be completed within that timeframe, every forty-five days thereafter, the insurer shall provide the claimant with a reasonable explanation for the delay and state when a decision on the claim may be expected.”)
Courts approach violations of the UIPA and UCSP regulations differently, ranging from a complete prohibition on considering their violation in proving statutory bad faith cases, to using those violations as evidence of bad faith. OurMay 2, 2019 post summarizes different approaches courts take in considering UIPA and Unfair Claim Settlement Practices regulations.
Most recently on this Blog, we summarized Western District Magistrate Judge Dodge’s December 2020 Kleinz v. Unitrin opinion. Magistrate Judge Dodge found that since the seminal Terletsky opinion in 1994, “federal courts have uniformly rejected plaintiffs’ attempt to rely on UIPA violations to support bad faith claims.” She found that contrary to the insured’s arguments that some federal cases hold otherwise, “for the past 26 years, case law in federal courts on this issue has been consistent.” Magistrate Judge Dodge cites, among other cases, the Third Circuit’s opinion in Leach, Judge Gibson’s 2019 Horvath opinion, Judge Fisher’s 2014 Kelman decision (while sitting by designation in the Western District), Judge Kosik’s 2007 Oehlmann decision, and Judge Conti’s 2007 Loos opinion.
