On August 26, 2010, DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc. (DePuy), a division of Johnson & Johnson, issued a voluntary recall of the DePuy ASR™ XL Acetabular System and ASR Hip Resurfacing Device – a total hip replacement system. It involves not only the replacement of the joint (ball and socket), but also the “neck” of the femur.…
Minnesota and Hawaii don’t have a lot in common. However, the Minnesota Court of Appeals – of all places – recently laid down some rather novel and earth-shattering law with regard to PIP subrogation in Hawaii. In American Family Mutual Ins. Co. v. American Automobile Ass’n d/b/a Auto Club Ins. Ass’n, 2013 WL 656493 (Minn.…
Robert Van Orden v. USAA, 2014 MT 45 (Mont. 2014) Montana has long been one of the toughest states to subrogate in because it has a very strict made whole policy. It is the public policy in Montana that an insured must be totally reimbursed for all losses as well as costs, including attorney fees…
Two Texas vehicle owners driving identical vehicles are involved in accidents caused by a negligent tortfeasor. Both contact their insurance company regarding their damaged vehicles. Both must wait for an appraiser to inspect the vehicle and write a report. One vehicle is repairable, the other is considered “totaled.” The owner of the vehicle being repaired…
Third-Party Cause Of Action No Longer Automatically Assigned To Employee After One Year In a mysterious legal sleight of hand that would make David Copperfield envious, the Arizona Court of Appeals has reinvented the English language by making it possible to reassign something that wasn’t assigned in the first place. In Acosta v. Kiewit-Sundt, 2014…
Whether you are investigating a subrogation claim or conducting interviews of injured claimants, being able to record a conversation and refer back to it can be indispensable to the handling of a matter either before or during litigation. Today’s technology makes obtaining clear recordings of conversation with witnesses easy to obtain, and in an industry…
A Christmas-day article in one of our local newspapers drives home the important lesson that a subrogation claim is often won or lost in the short period immediately following a loss. On July 6, 2013, pieces of electrical equipment in the basement of the Milwaukee County Courthouse started on fire, closing the courthouse for days.…
As most subrogation professionals handling auto subrogation in Illinois know, Illinois Senate Bill signed into law effective January 1, 2012 changed subrogation in that state significantly. For the first time, Illinois mandated that in collision subrogation cases involving amounts less than $2,500, recently-enacted § 143.24d now required mandatory arbitration between all auto carriers. That development…
In reviewing a three-year-old property subrogation file for a client recently, we noticed repeated references in the claim notes to the lack of subrogation due to the fact that the insured had agreed to indemnify the tortfeasor for any damages resulting from the relationship between the insured and tortfeasor. Many assume that simply because the…
For those who are not aware, in 2013, Claims Journal’s online magazine asked Gary Wickert to begin a new monthly column focusing on subrogation and related claims and insurance topics. Gary’s column can be found HERE. The column was very well-received and provides subrogation with a very widely-read medium in which to talk shop and lobby…