Claim professionals working in Texas, beware — you may soon be dealing with more litigiousness stemming from last year's hurricane season.
Baron & Budd, P.C., a Dallas-based law firm, has established an insurance claim practice intended to aid policyholders affected by Hurricanes Ike and Gustav in negotiating property insurance claims with insurers. In announcing the practice, firm shareholder Bruce Steckler charged insurers of operating under a system that is "too flawed, too complex, and too skewed toward the insurance companies' interests for individuals or companies to navigate without experienced legal assistance."
The practice will be headed by Steckler, who is a veteran civil justice attorney with a history of representing clients in insurance disputes. The firm will employ independent claim adjusters to assess homes, offices, churches, and commercial and retail buildings. A release stated that the firm will advise clients about how to contest tactics that it says insurers use to avoid paying legitimate claims, including denial of covered claims; ambiguous policy exclusions; attempts to blame the damage on excluded causes; and underpayment because of computerized data sources.
"Contrary to the businesses in Louisiana and southeast Texas that are battling both hurricane damages and a difficult economy, the country's insurance companies are flush with assets," said Russell Budd, founder and managing shareholder of Baron & Budd. "The assets of the top 10 insurance companies in this country exceed the GDP of every nation in the world, except for two."
American Insurance Association's Fred Bosse, vice president of state government affairs, disagreed by reasserting the insurance industry's commitment to closing claims and moving forward.
"Insurers remain at the forefront in helping Gulf Coast residents recover from Hurricanes Ike and Gustav," he said. "We have been proactive participants in the region's recovery and coordinated our efforts with the departments of insurance in both Louisiana and Texas to process the more than one million claims from these storms. Indeed, the industry has received high marks from insurance regulators for its performance following Ike and Gustav in 2008.
Bosse's point is supported by statistics presented by Mark Hanna, spokesman for the Insurance Council of Texas.
"Texas will have approximately 730,000 claims from Hurricane Ike," said Hanna. "Thus far, the Texas Department of Insurance has received just over 3,000 complaints from policyholders. However, only one out of every three complaints received is justified, which equates to 0.14 percent. I think you would be hard pressed to find any [industry] that deals with billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of customers that has a complaint ratio this low."
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