COURT OUTLINES PRINCIPLES FOR REMOVING BAD FAITH CLAIMS TO FEDERAL COURT (Philadelphia Federal)
Federal Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg sets out useful examples and principles concerning removal of statutory bad faith claims to federal court. The issue in these cases is the degree of certainty needed to measure claims made against the $75,000 jurisdictional threshold.
The sum at issue is determined at the time the petition to remove is filed.
Courts do not look at the low end of an open-ended claim; rather, the measure is “a reasonable reading of the value of the rights being litigated.”
Punitive damages and attorneys’ fees are considered in statutory bad faith cases.
There is no recovery cap on the punitive damages and attorneys’ fees available under the bad faith statute.
[Note: Attorney’s fees must still be reasonable, and the U.S. Supreme Court has placed limits on punitive damages to conform to due process requirements.]
In a bad faith case, the “amount in controversy exceeds the $75,000 threshold where a plaintiff is able to recover a specified amount of damages, plus punitive damages and attorney’s fees….”
The court gave two case examples of pleading specified damages along with punitives: (1) a claim for $53,315 in contract damages accompanied by a bad faith claim “in excess of $50,000 together with interests and costs” was sufficient; and (2) a claim for $28,682.41 in unpaid benefits plus punitive damages was sufficient.
Under this line of cases, the instant plaintiff’s claim for $24,711.11 plus punitive damages meets the $75,000 pleading threshold.
By contrast, failure to plead a specific unpaid benefit amount works against removal.
In two cases where the action was remanded, the plaintiffs pleaded lost benefits in “an amount not in excess of $50,000” and punitive damages “not in excess of $50,000”.
In this case, even though the $75,000 threshold was met, the court still remanded the action because removal was untimely. The insurer argued that any damage sum was uncertain as pleaded in the complaint. Therefore, any effort at removal lacked “legal certainty” and the insurer had to serve requests for admissions to get sufficient clarity before it could properly remove the action. This process took many months.
The court disagreed, finding the complaint itself was adequate to make the monetary threshold determination. Thus, the thirty-day removal period from service of the complaint had long passed, without the insurer taking action to remove the case, and the case was remanded.
Date of Decision: January 28, 2019
Hutchinson v. State Farm Fire & Casualty Co., U.S. District Court Eastern District of Pennsylvania CIVIL ACTION No. 18-cv-2588, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13820 (E.D. Pa. Jan. 28, 2019) (Goldberg, J.)
