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…
In what will go down in legal history as one of the clearest and most forthright decisions in recent memory, the Florida Supreme Court has issued an opinion which limits the application of the Economic Loss Doctrine (ELD) to cases involving product liability. Tiara Condo. Ass’n, Inc. v. Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., No. SC10-1022…
Urban legends and old wives’ tales are everywhere. If you eat within an hour of swimming, you will get cramps. Chocolate causes acne. Carrots improve your vision. You can catch a cold by standing outside in the cold. You can ruin your eyesight by sitting too close to the television. Toads cause warts. Cracking your…
Until July 30, 2013, Connecticut was still one of the few states which hadn’t officially adopted the equitable Made Whole Doctrine in a subrogation setting. However, the new Supreme Court decision in Fireman’s Fund Ins. Co. v. TD Banknorth Ins. Agency, Inc., 2013 WL 3818112 (Conn. 2013) has changed that. In their recently-released decision, the…
Effective subrogation requires a thorough understanding of some of the more confusing legal terms we must all work with. Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer, S.C. has compiled a list of the various laws in every state dealing with whether the state is a contributory negligence state (bars recovery with only 1% of fault by the plaintiff)…
On April 17, 2013, a fire of as-of-yet-undetermined origin at the West Fertilizer Company in West, Texas ignited as much as 270 tons of ammonium nitrate being stored at the facility. The resulting blast left a 90-foot-wide crater and caused an estimated $125 million in damage. The blast killed 15 people, injured at least 200,…
As a means of raising revenue, particularly during times of economic crisis, a handful of states employ, and many states repeatedly revisit, the dubious and counter-productive scheme of imposing a tax on professional services, whether as a sales tax (including lifting an exemption in many states’ sales tax code for professional services), use tax, excise…
A rapidly changing area of insurance defense involves products causing injury or damage to people and property. Many states are moving towards adopting the standards set by the Restatement (Third) of Torts, and Wisconsin is no different. On February 1, 2011, the Wisconsin Omnibus Tort Reform Act went into effect, severely affecting and changing products…